


Even the Walls

by JanellyficWIPgraveyard (LadyJanelly)



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-17 16:46:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16978284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanelly/pseuds/JanellyficWIPgraveyard
Summary: As Sidney follows the hard road to success, he dreams of a place he can be himself, a magical place where he is enough, just as he is.On one of the worst nights of his life, a visitor from that world saves him and brings him Home.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is abandoned, but with Tumblr failing, I wanted to start archiving WIPs over here. Chapter 1 is to the best stopping point for a complete-ish story. Chapter 2 is everything else I've written on it, including a short synopsis of where I wanted the fic to go.
> 
> This fic was started in...2010? 2011? Wow, a long time ago, anyway.
> 
> TW for attempted non-con and physical violence against an inebriated person (neither Sid nor Geno as the perpetrator--doesn't get very far)

The other children have stories, told to them by the adults who love them. Stories of _Lost and unloved, hungry and scared and tired. And then here, Home. Cherished and cared for and always, always loved._ Some of them were old enough when they were found to remember, to tell their own accounts of a kind face, a gentle hand, being welcomed where before there had only been neglect, abuse. 

A few of the children Evgeni knows were born at Home, but they have their own stories, a lineage of parents and grandparents, back until the first foundlings of their line.

Evgeni doesn’t have a story, although he has so much love. Mama Ksyusha who cares for him when he’s tiny, her voice a sing-song backdrop to his childhood, her kitchen the center of his world. Papa Borya, who first takes him out into the tunnels, who teaches him Home’s ways, how to ask Her for guidance, to take him where he belongs. Borya shows him his first Doors outside, quick glimpses at a place where the ceiling is high beyond sight, where it can be bright or dark without human choice. 

”It is beautiful,” Evgeni breathes, as he stares down at a city filled with tiny dancing lights. Flecks of white frozen water fall on his hair. The worn stone parapet is cold beneath his mittened hands. He has seen cars before, rounded metal boxes on wheels, but never from above like this, a river of light below them.

“Zhenya,” Borya says, the nickname like an embrace. “Zhenya, please, come away,” and he sounds worried, so Evgeni does as he’s asked. 

“Here, you find the door,” Borya suggests, and it’s a game they’ve been playing for a while. He turns to the wall behind him, an old wall, a good one, years of _being_ tying it to this place. He runs his fingers along the decorative edges, feeling with his fingers and his mind, searching for the crack. 

Borya sighs with relief when he finds it. Evgeni pushes in, and the wall opens. Home welcomes them in with a wave of warm air, a whisper of acceptance just below hearing.

Evgeni lights a lantern and leads the way, shaping his want (Mama Ksyusha, her kitchen, the bean soup and black bread she was planning to make). He trusts Home to take him there, through familiar tunnels he’s never seen before, sometimes brick and sometimes stone. Smooth plaster or rough-hewn blocks. 

His nose leads him the last few turns, and then he’s stepping into the light of Mama Ksyusha’s kitchen, into the bustle of half a dozen helpers turning out the communal meal.

He scuttles around underfoot, stealing one of the pastries intended for desert, a slice of melon from the fruit bowl. Ksyusha chases him off with a spoon, and Borya laughs, “You cannot tame the stomach of a growing boy!” but he herds Evgeni to a spot at the table, distracts him with talk of their time outside until the rest of their enclave comes to eat and the meal is served. 

Later, when the food is gone and the kitchen clean, Evgeni’s hands wrinkled from washing and wiping, Borya takes him back to the chamber that is theirs. It is a warm looking place, small but richly paneled with honey-colored wood, a broad panorama of stained glass. Sometimes Borya will open the Door behind the glass and the whole room will glow with color like the jewels in a dragon’s hoard. Borya’s bed is here, and the pile of soft quilts and pillows that Evgeni sleeps on. He settles into his pallet, the excitement of his day fading to contented exhaustion.

Borya says to him, “I think it is time that I told you your story, how you came Home.”

Evgeni frowns and pulls the blanket up tighter against the back of his neck, afraid though he doesn’t know why. Maybe his story is bad. There must be a reason he’s never heard it told. A reason for the secret.

“Your mother was Mama Ksyusha’s daughter,” Borya says, and Evgeni never knew that, never even dreamed it. 

“She was a wild child, in a way our people rarely are. She loved the outside, more than she loved Home. She met a man there, and loved him, but he was blind and could not find the doors. Could not even see them when she showed him.”

Borya looks down at his hands, and Evgeni wants to comfort him, but doesn’t know how. He feels a surge of pity, for his unknown father, for all the people outside, how alone they all are, how isolated.

“She came back to us, heavy with child, back to the shelter of Home.” His lips twist, wry and sad. “She had you here, born in the garden with the sky-door open and the sun lighting your birth, her sisters and mamas around her. We thought she would stay, then, but she wasn’t happy.

“She was not the other half of my heart,” Borya says like it’s a confession, “But I would have cherished her. Perhaps the other man was what I could never be.

“She tried to leave, tried to take you with her into the world, but Home wouldn’t let you go. Anya. Everywhere she turned, it was not to the place her man was. Every Door opened to bitter cold or burning desert. Black seamless night or waveless water as far as she could see. She didn’t know. If it was because you wanted to stay, as tiny as you were then, or if Home was unwilling to have a baby taken from Her.”

He swallows hard and covers his eyes with his hand. “She put you in my arms and walked away. The door opened and gave her the outside that she wanted. Her man was waiting, and she never came Home again.”

==========

 

Sid dreams. When things are hard, when the joy of playing hockey is drowned out by the screamed insults heaped upon his head by the opposing team’s parents. When competitiveness turns to _hatred_ and another boy looks into Sid’s eyes as he swings his hockey stick into Sid’s shin like this is baseball and Sid’s leg is the ball. When he wonders if even his friends hate him, for always making them second-best on the ice, for always stealing the spotlight.

Some of his dreams are clear, easy to remember. Standing on the podium to take the Olympic gold. Lifting the weight of the Stanley Cup over his head. They’re like the visualization exercises his sports psychologist works with him on. Every physical sensation imagined in the smallest detail. But the emotions—they’re like a photo of a photo of a photo. What he thinks he’ll feel when the time comes. What he hopes it will be like. 

The other dreams, those are the ones that bring him comfort. They’re fragmented. Glimpses of strange wonders. A bowl-shaped garden like a stadium, bathed in sunlight, tiers of thriving plant-life spilling from terraced levels. He dreams of darkness and warmth, a sense of utter safeness. He dreams of hard work—the muscles of his arms and shoulders burning, and a sense of satisfaction glowing in his chest. 

Sometimes he remembers hearing people talk, but the words never make sense. He asks the psychologist once, how he can dream in a language he doesn’t know, and she explains that it’s like how you can identify a watch in your peripheral vision, but can’t tell the time. That the language he thinks he hears is just a symbol his mind has made for something being unattainable. 

He doesn’t remember the faces in his dreams, not clearly. He’ll recall a gentle touch against his cheek, or strong hands guiding his to teach some task—how to stir the raisins into a bowl of batter, or how to plane a piece of wood. His clearest memory is of children, in the snow. Herding half a dozen of them, bundled up in hoods and cloaks and thick jackets, mismatched little bodies tromping through a forest. And then a strip of frozen river before them, untouched except for some moose-tracks along the snowy edge. He dreams of his own hands, helping the little ones strap wooden skates on over their boots, wrapping and tying them tight. Mittened hands in his as he leads them out on the ice. 

He wakes up renewed. He’s always been told that there is Olympic gold and Stanley silver in his future, and he believes it. 

The dreams tell him there’s happiness out there too, joy that he doesn’t have to win to have.

============  
Evgeni grows, putting aside the whimsy of childhood for new adventures and new responsibilities. He starts his journey of discovery, spending time at different tasks to find what suits him, learning the secrets of the world.

He is young, and surrounded by family and friends, but already he longs for the other half of his heart to join with him and so he uses his journey to search. He goes by choice to the other enclaves, hoping to find the one he seeks. 

He works the gardens of Kamen, learning to help keep the door above open to the sun while his hands plant the seedlings and turn the earth and gather the harvest. He learns how to prune the peach trees, and he meets Misha there, who creates the most improbable tales and kisses Evgeni in the hot baths when the day’s dirty work is done. 

He serves the hearth at Tsentr, hauling wood Home and feeding the fires, working dough for bread until his arms feel too weak to move. He joins his voice to the working songs of their kitchen. 

He spends only a short time with the Astronomi, looking out a door that she says is always the same place. Enough to know he has no aptitude for the numbers and angles. He can barely wrap his mind around the idea that there is a cycle above, that the sun sweeps over the world outside in the same pattern, light, dark, light, dark. She listens to his story, and then shows him in the book of life, the day he was born, when his mother was born, and Mama Ksyusha. “You have lived eighteen years, by the reckoning of the outside,” he is told, but it doesn’t mean much. “You are older now than your mother was when she left Home,” she says, and he mourns anew the decisions his mother had felt forced to make.

He saves scavenging for last, hoping some other duty could fulfill him, and that he would find the one he seeks in the kitchens or the workshops, find him with sawdust on his cheek or between the shelves in the library. 

He’s met everyone though, and found companionship, affection, the joys of pleasurable touch, but none that call to him with a lifetime’s promise. 

The Poproshayek are a different kind of community. Not an enclave. Most of them sleep in their childhood group, eat and marry where they were raised. They work together though. Meet up in threes and fours, for the safety of numbers as they slip into the outside to get the things their people cannot make or grow.

Pashok and Little Angie are willing to show Evgeni the world, and scavenging is nothing like the short tours he’d made with Borya or foraging for firewood in abandoned forests. Angie was old enough to speak when she’d come Home, and the first place she leads them is the door she’d been taken through. 

“Detroit,” she calls it, and they stay there a long time, walking in a straight line down roads that don’t change. He can look back, and it is exactly the same, the sky bleeding open as the sun rises, so much space above them that it makes him dizzy. It’s the furthest he’s traveled outside, farther than the river is from the standing stones. His sense of scale twists and bucks in his head, overwhelming him with how _much_ there is outside, how _many_ the people are. 

He has to sit for a moment, and Pashok stands guard over them while Angie pats Evgeni’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” she says, in the language of Home and again the way they speak it here, so he can learn. “You’re okay. Breathe and wait.” 

He stands again a few moments later, pushing aside the crush of despair, that he will ever find his other half in so many people. 

Angie leads them to an abandoned building to sleep as the sky goes dark again. They brush rubble and refuse off of a spot on the floor and spread their blankets close together. Angie sleeps against Evgeni’s left side, and Pashok at his right. The building reeks with rot, but in the morning, when he feels for a door, it’s too new also, the walls unconnected and dead. They walk outside, and the only difference from the night before is the level of light. He lets his thoughts be reshaped again, accepts that this is how it is outside. Thinks how to work within these new parameters. 

He learns the way of moving among the outside people, the strange dance they do of pretending they don’t see each other as they walk past. “Don’t look in their eyes,” Angie warns, “Don’t smile. Keep moving.” It seems lonely and pointless, but the first time Evgeni doesn’t take her advice a man snarls an insult at him and pushes his shoulder, so he follows the rules after that.

The job of scavenging is quick stops sometimes, long days of hard work at others. They step into darkened buildings, grab a pair of boots here, bottles of cinnamon and boxes of cocoa there and leave again. They go to an old barn and dig through a mountain of rusted metal and mildewed leather to find tools to take back to the gardens, things they can clean and repair and use. 

It is exhausting, but satisfying. To provide for his people. He spends two dozen trips outside, chiseling tile off of an abandoned wall for a project Borya wants. Later, Borya shows him the chamber he has decorated, jewel-toned tile to waist height, smooth white plaster above. Colored-glass fills the end curve of the barrel-domed room, like the window Evgeni loved so much in Borya’s home. 

“It is for you,” Borya tells him, and gifts him with a new broom for a new home. Evgeni starts scavenging for himself, trying to create a place of comfort and beauty —cushions and blankets, an upholstered chair that the crafters repair for him and a table with ornate carved legs that he cleans and polishes. He brings beams home, and together he and Borya cut them to length and plane them for his floor, and build a shelf for the things he has found and kept just because looking at them brings him pleasure. 

Every moment they spend working seems to bring Borya more peace, and Evgeni understands. The work he does here, making the chamber his own, it is a promise to stay, another tie to Home. 

He takes his first child soon after that. Opens a door that should lead to a source for bricks, but instead there is only the sound of tremulous screams, a room so dark he cannot see his hand in front of his face. He stumbles through the blackness, hears the skittering and squeaking of rats and smells the sick odor of excrement rotting. He reaches towards the cries and finds the baby, draws it to his chest despite the filth. 

The baby almost dies, from the rat bites and the infection. She’s strong though, a good girl. Mama Ksyusha names her Evpraksiya when they are sure she will live, and Evgeni’s name is part of her story, and nothing he has done in his life has brought him as much pride as bringing her Home.

He is vzroslyy then, adult. Proven to be responsible, a part of Home that can be depended upon to act with wisdom, courage and kindness. His enclave celebrates with sugar-beet vodka, the friends he has made from other families coming to share the event with him. There is music and dancing, Misha’s mandolin and Angie’s fiddle. It is a dizzy time, the joy nearly overwhelming. 

If Evgeni’s heart-mate was at his side, it would be perfect.

==============

Sid needs better friends. Okay, that’s not exactly true, because his friends are his team, and he cannot imagine being closer to any group of guys, cannot imagine any better collection of people than his team. 

He would, however, appreciate it if they wouldn’t trick him out of his Newark hotel room with promises of “Just one beer, Sid, come on, we won!” and then one beer becomes three and there are celebratory shots. He’s just never sure when to draw the line, how to turn them down when they’re so happy and he’s a part of that. 

The club is loud, flashing lights and pounding music. He can’t hear what Flower’s saying as he brings the next round of drinks, pushing a shot-glass into Sid’s hand and slapping him on the back. 

He wants to. For solidarity. For team-building. His stomach roils and he stands up. He sets the full shot back on the table and gestures vaguely towards the back of the club. “I’ll be back,” he promises, and the guys tease him but let him go without too much harassment. He just needs a minute, to get out of the crowd and the physical assault of the music. 

He’s almost to the restroom and he can see the line to get in, and the sour faces of the guys coming out. Somebody has puked in there, or is currently puking in there. Sid figures with the way the alcohol is churning in his guts that going in is a bad idea, and staying in the club is bad. Getting a breath of fresh cool air sounds really good. 

The line for the coat-check is about eight people deep and the attendant is looking frazzled. Sid’s just going out to cool down, and drunk-logic sees his coat as an impediment to that anyway, so he steps out into the cold, the crisp burn of snow soon to fall sharp in his nostrils. 

Better, he thinks, and he’ll just take a little walk, just to the next street-light and back and then go back inside to the team. But he gets to the street-light and his stomach is starting to really object to the amount of alcohol inside of it, his throat getting tense in anticipation. There are people outside, getting into cabs. None really noticing him yet, but that could change any moment, and he really doesn’t want photos of him barfing into a gutter on Deadspin. 

He keeps walking, feeling the cold now. He wraps his arms around himself, shivering. He’ll just find an alley, take care of this, go back to the club. The block seems long, and the first alley is around the corner and down a ways. Who plans these things, anyway? It seems unnecessarily inconvenient.

“Hey,” he hears from behind him, and turns. A man is following him into the alley, tall and blond and handsome in a bland, Staal-esque way. “I saw you looking at me,” the man says, low and sly and Sid would like to shake his head to clear it, but nothing good will come of rattling his brains right now, he’s pretty sure.

He blinks, and the guy is a lot closer. “Good job ditching your friends,” he says, and smirks. “We’ll make it quick; it’s cold as fuck out here.” 

Sid has to think a minute, to be sure he didn’t make the invitation this guy seems to think that he’s made. He’s fantasized about it before, catching some guy’s eye in a bar, meeting him outside and taking a cab to a hotel for a quick fuck before going back to his team. It _could_ have happened, but he’s pretty sure it didn’t. 

“No, sorry,” he says, feeling more queasy than apologetic. “I’m just. Not feeling great. Needed some fresh air.” 

“Don’t be like that,” the guy warns, the jovial smile slipping from his lips. “I didn’t come out in this weather for you to change your mind.”

Sid holds a finger up in the universal “Just one minute” gesture and turns to vomit on the ground. 

The guy makes a face, and Sid hopes for a second that will be the end of it. “I would have taken a blow job,” he says with insincere regret, and he steps in, pushing Sid away from the mess on the ground, further into the alley, and fuck that. Sid might not be known for his fighting on the ice, but he’s not taking this shit. He pushes back, a stiff-armed hit to the guy’s chest, letting him know Sid’s serious about this.

The blond looks surprised, and Sid shoves him again. “Leave me the hell alone,” he says, feeling stronger now that his stomach is empty. 

The punch to his eye is unexpected, and the brick wall on his other side is a lot closer than Sid thought it would be. He doesn’t go down though, grabbing the asshole’s coat in his left hand and swinging up with his right. Sid catches him a good hit on the jaw, his grip on the coat dragging him along as the man pulls back. 

The guy slips in the puddle of sick and goes down and Sid doesn’t have the balance to let him go and keep standing, so he falls on top of him. They flail limbs at each other and finally the guy rolls Sid to the side. He’s not sure how it happens, but the other guy is on his feet and Sid is still on the ground, catching kicks with his ribs until he tries to block and then he’s catching kicks on his arms. One slams into his wrist and he feels something go wrong, and thinks that if he was sober this would really hurt. 

He’s not sure if he loses consciousness or just doesn’t notice when the guy is done kicking the shit out of him. Fuck, the entire team is going to make fun of him forever for this. He rolls to his knees and tries to push up but his left wrist just isn’t working right. He’s shaking. Can’t catch his breath. His team-mates may be the least of his problems, he thinks, once the trainers and doctors and coaches get a hold of him. Mario is going to be so disappointed. 

He manages to get to his feet without using the uncooperative hand. He’s just cognizant enough to realize he has to take the watch off or it’ll have to be cut off when the wrist swells up. He thinks he’ll just go back to the club. Have his friends take him back to the hotel. It’ll be fine. He cradles the wrist against his stomach. The broken wrist. He’s a big boy, he can call it what it is. He cradles his broken wrist and walks, but it seems like it’s farther going back than it had been walking out. Even compensating for how messed up he is, it seems far. He decides that enough is enough, and starts feeling around for his phone. It’s not in his back pocket where it usually is, not in the front ones. He can’t even remember if he left it on the table back in the bar.

He looks for someone he can ask for help, but the streets are sparsely populated, hookers on the corners and men in bulky coats, hoods pulled low. It doesn’t seem like a hospitable environment. 

“Look what we got here!” someone hoots behind him, and he’s surrounded by strangers. They back him down another alley, shove him around some. He feels hands on his pockets, feels them take his wallet and watch. 

They leave him lying on a pile of garbage with nothing on his feet but socks and Sid thinks this is bad, really bad, but at least it isn’t so cold anymore. At least he’s stopped shivering. At least it’s quiet.

===========

Evgeni is out scavenging with two others-- Angie, small and slim and dark, and a boy from Tsentr named Luka, still on his journey to discover his place. Luka is hesitant, unwilling to be outside of Home a moment longer than he needs to be, walking hunched over like he thinks the sky will reach down and take him. He stays close to the walls of the buildings, and Evgeni thinks he’s not long for the Poproshayek, that he will be happier going back to the gardens of his fathers, to the still world of the fruit trees, where nothing is more threatening than the lazy swarms of bees.

They step out of a door, and it is winter above, here. It is night, but the lights of the city reflect off of the low cover of clouds and cast the world into a perpetual twilight. It is colder than the last scavenge he had gone on, and he pulls the knitted cap he wears down against his ears. They walk, Angie in front and Evgeni in the rear. Luka floats miserable between them, wanting to be close beside one of his companions but unwilling to be first contact with any outsiders they meet, unhappy to have someone behind him that isn’t of Home. He lacks the quiet confidence of adulthood, and Evgeni thinks that after they are Home again, he will speak to the boy, suggest he grows more among the people of his enclave before he ventures above.

“What is it we hope to find here?” Luka asks, stumbling over a pile of refuse on the sidewalk.

They all carry a list in their minds, the staples their people always need to supplement the food that they can grow, and those special luxury items that cannot be made with the resources of Home. Books and pens, glass and cloth, boots and tools. 

Evgeni cannot say that the graffitied walls and broken cement of the street they walk along hold much promise that the people here are likely to have, and be able to spare, the things on their lists. Angie has been Poproshayek longer than he though, and he will not contradict her in front of a child. 

“Learn to see,” Evgeni tells Luka. “There is use in all things.”

Angie, ahead of them, ducks down an alley and kicks through a pile of garbage. Luka joins her, digging through with the toe of his boot, and Evgeni stands watch, keeping an eye out for trouble that may come their way. 

“Oh,” Luka says, sounding startled, and Evgeni looks over. “There is a man here; I think he’s alive.” 

Evgeni has seen it before. People thrown away like trash, and he will never understand the outsiders, how they can let another fall without reaching a hand. How they can harm their own, beat their women, starve their children. 

The man is tall, Evgeni thinks, trying to translate length into height. Dark hair and pale skin. Dazed eyes that roll as Evgeni shakes his shoulder. 

“Don’t…” the man says, speaking in the tongue of Detroit. He makes an uncoordinated effort to crawl away but doesn’t manage to actually move himself. His face is beaten and bloodied, his skin cold to the touch and his thin shirt and pants do little to protect him.

“Do we leave him?” Luka asks, and Evgeni doesn’t want to. He looks up at Angie and she’s known him for long enough that she can see the question in his eyes. 

“We should take him to his people,” she says. “He is no child to snatch away.”

It is a plan. Better than watching the stranger freeze to death. Evgeni strips off the outer layer of his winter clothing and wraps the man in its warmth. He makes a protest as Evgeni lifts him, but quiets again sooner than a healthy person should. He is solid in Evgeni’s arms, heavier than he’d have expected, densely muscled and strong. 

Evgeni carries him to the next street over, where women walk in clothes that bare their legs to the cold, where cars drive by slowly. He lays the man down and walks away, leaving his best coat but the man will not last without it and Evgeni will be warm soon and can find another later. Heads turn as people stop to watch Evgeni put the man on the sidewalk, but nobody speaks to him.

They move away, stand close to each other in a shadowed angle of a nearby wall and watch, but nobody goes to help the man on the ground. Nobody even goes to see if he is well. Evgeni knew that things were different above, but has never seen it so starkly, the indifference that they treat each other with. An elder walks past, stumbles over the man on the ground, frowns and keeps walking.

“He is dying,” Evgeni says. Angie leans against him and he borrows a little of her warmth. 

“He is not ours,” she warns him. “This is not like taking a child, Zhenya.”

And no, it is not. A child, taken from above and raised at Home, this is a good thing, a healthy thing. But an adult? It is not to be taken lightly, as the tales of the troubled times remind them. They have all heard the stories, of Jakob who went to take a child, and came Home with tales of burning corpses, the star-people shot down and murdered by the dozens, maybe hundreds. Bodies piled into pits and more waiting for bullets in walled-off enclaves in the cities above. 

They had helped then, Home opening her doors and bringing them inside, but few were ever happy there. Their minds could not accept the way the tunnels guided them, or the way the days did not follow the order they expected. Except for a few, one by one they found safe exit and new places to dwell above. Only a handful of children and three adults had ever stayed, out of the hundreds that had passed through. 

“He is abandoned,” Evgeni says, and they watch as one of the women looks over her shoulder, and then crouches and gropes through the coat the man is wrapped in. She finds nothing to interest her and leaves him where he rests.

Angie presses her lips together and Luka hugs his elbows.

“He can curse me himself, when he is warm and well,” Evgeni decides, and he goes back to the man, gathers him up again and they walk. 

=========

“How long can it take the guy to take a piss?” Jordy asks and Flower looks down to where Sid’s shot is still sitting on the table, waiting for him to come back. 

Flower looks around, but doesn’t see Sid anywhere. He’s a little drunk. Okay a little more than drunk. He’s not sure exactly how long it’s been since Sid wandered off. 

“Go check,” he says, and shoves at Jordy. They grumble back and forth and finally Jordy heads to the restrooms, weaving more than the crowd would force him to, and Flower congratulates himself on his delegation skills.

In a stroke of genius, he pulls out his phone, but it’s too loud to even hear if it’s ringing on the other end, so he hangs up and sends Sid a text instead, a “Hey loser are you at the hotel?” and grins, thinking of Sid getting it as he pukes his guts up.

It seems like a long time goes by, but Jordy finally gets back to the table, looking more worried and less drunk. “Not there,” he says. Well, shit. 

Flower climbs out of the booth, taking Jordy’s hand to pull himself to his feet. He waves vaguely at the front door. “I’ll call him,” he says.

Outside the temperature is dropping, and Flower hunches against the wind as he dials Sid’s number, and when there’s no answer there, the hotel. No Sid, no Sid, no Sid. Fuck.

Jordy comes out of the club with both of their jackets. “Who’s sober?” Flower asks him, but Jordy shakes his head. 

“We’ve got hired cars on call. No designated drivers. I think everybody’s drinking.” 

Flower nods, and wishes there was a switch he could throw to purge the alcohol from his brain. “We need to gather up the guys,” he says, “See if anybody saw him leaving with a girl or something.” It’s the most ridiculous thing he can imagine, but anything is more possible than Sidney Fucking Crosby disappearing into thin air. 

Flower stays at the door, sending texts to everybody who’s on the road trip with them. He calls the car service, but Sid hasn’t called for transportation. Jordy goes back in to send reinforcements and other members of the team trickle out in various stages of inebriation. 

One of the guys saw Sid stumbling through towards the bathrooms, looking green around the gills, but that’s the last contact anyone had. 

“Okay,” Flower says, trying to gather his sodden wits. “Okay, let’s make a sweep of the club. Make _sure_ he’s not here. Jordy, you stay on the door and make sure he doesn’t slip out past us. (name), you head to the hotel. See if he made it back there.”

“What? Why me?” Jordy protests, and Flower shudders. 

“I’m freezing my nuts off out here. It’s your turn.”

So they search the club, the team and the few support-staff guys who’d been out with them. Moving through the crowds and talking to the bouncers. It feels like someone must have seen something, but if they did, nobody admits to it. 

Jordy is dialing Sid’s phone for the millionth time when they all regroup outside. He shakes his head and hangs up when Flower joins him. They compare notes. Not here, not at the hotel. Not with the car service.

“Okay,” Flower says, but it feels like anything but. “Lets spread out. See if he wandered off.” The team splits up, half heading each direction from the club, enough guys to split up and split up again as different paths open up.

If it was anybody else, he’d be phoning emergency rooms, but this is Sidney Crosby and there’s no way a dozen panicked inquiries wouldn’t get leaked to the media. He opens his phone to make the call nobody on the Pens ever ever wants to make.

Mario’s voice is rough with sleep when he answers the phone. “Fleury?” he says, and Flower is glad he’s woken the man up at the hotel and not at home with his wife. 

“Have you heard from Sid tonight?” Flower asks, and when Mario says “No. Why?” there’s no sign at all of his earlier bleariness. 

He feels like a coward, but it’s such a relief to pass the burden on to someone more responsible, more sober. He tells the whole story, from dragging Sid out against his will, to getting him drunk, to letting him wander off. 

“Fleury,” Mario cuts in towards the end, “Marc-Andre, this isn’t your fault. Stay where you are. I’ll get dressed and be there in fifteen minutes. We’ll figure this out.” 

“Okay,” Flower says, and Mario hangs up, leaving him standing in the cold, waiting to hear anything, from anybody. The waiting is killing him. He fiddles with his phone, and his thumb settles on Sid’s name. One last call. It can’t hurt anything, right?

His heart skips when the dialing sounds break off in the middle of the third ring. 

There’s near-silence on the other end for a long moment, and Flower’s heart freezes in his chest, waiting.

“Sid?” he asks, when he can’t bear it another second. 

The connection breaks suddenly, and when he calls back it goes straight to voice mail like it’s been turned completely off. 

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. 

———————————

Mario comes and takes over. Flower can see he’s reluctant to do it, but eventually the police are called in. The team sits around the night club after closing time. The overhead lights are all on and the neon off, the sound of the staff cleaning up behind the bar echoing strangely in the music-free quiet. The guys sit and sip at their water glasses, bowed by the weight of their own guilt and Mario’s worry. 

Flower is one of the first to talk to the officers. He doesn’t want to admit that Sid was drinking, that he was drunk, but Mario said to tell the truth and let him deal with whatever PR fallout there was.

Mario sends everyone back to the hotel when they’re done with the interviews. They fly in the morning and have a game the day after that, Sid or no Sid. Flower can’t stand to go, to be alone in the room Sid was supposed to share with him. They don’t talk about it, but Mario doesn’t insist when Flower is still there after the others are gone. He doesn’t protest when Flower joins him in the back of the detective’s car. 

The police set them up in a corner of a waiting room of some kind. They watch as distraught family members and sullen teenagers, dead-eyed women and muttering vagrants go in and out, uniformed officers and plain-clothed detectives processing them through, collecting data, taking statements. He knows that Sid isn’t the only thing going on tonight, but he can’t help but search every face, wonder if he recognizes them, or should. 

Mario spends half the time on his phone, calling the Pens front office people at home, waking up the pubic relations guys and the lawyers. There’s talk of private investigators, but they’re holding off for now.

Sid hasn’t turned up by daybreak, but the detective comes over to tell them Sid’s wallet has been found. There’s definitely been some foul play. The teenagers who had his credit cards admitted to taking them, but said they never hit him. Said they left him passed out drunk in the alley behind a restaurant, but he was gone (or never there) when the police got there. 

Nobody can figure out why Sid hasn’t checked in. Nobody can figure out where he’s gone.

At seven, Mario calls the car, pulls Flower to his feet, and walks him out of the station. 

“Sleep on the plane,” he says, and he’s never looked old to Flower before this. “I need to call Nathalie and let her know what’s happened.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “Sid’s parents too.”

Flower wants to protest, wants to stay and do nothing here instead of getting on the plane and doing nothing there. But he won’t add to Mario’s burden right now, so he hugs the man who is like a second father to Sidney, then he gets in the damn car and goes.

=========

The nearest wall old enough to find a door in is blocks away from where they found the man, and he’s getting heavy by the time they get there. Angie hurries ahead the last few yards to open the way. 

Evgeni carries the man through and there is no tunnel stretching before them, just the arching cavern roof of the hot springs. 

“Thank you,” he says, to Angie and Home both, because this is perfect, the best place for the man. Together, they get him to the edge of the lowest pool, the coolest water where the keepers of the garden wash the soil from their skin, and the bakers the flour and the artist the paint. It is the place Evgeni goes whenever he comes from outside, to wash away the things he has seen and become new again. They strip the man there on the rock, and he wakes enough to fight them, twisting in Evgeni’s grip as he tries to keep the man from hurting himself. Angie soothes him down, soft words in the man’s own language, and he calms for long enough for Evgeni to peel off his own clothes, sweat-damp already with exertion and the warmth of the room. 

Evgeni climbs down into the water and Angie passes the man down to him. He fights again, “No,” he shouts, “No, it’s too hot; you’re burning me, stop!” and it breaks Evgeni’s heart to force him into the tepid water, to ignore his cries of pain and fear. Bare skin slides together, and one thrash sends the man’s head cracking against Evgeni’s cheekbone, but the outburst doesn’t last long. The man has little strength left, and he soon breaks down to quiet sobs as the water takes his weight and his skin looses its chill. When he is as warm as the water, Evgeni moves him to the next pool, and the man protests the heat again, weaker this time. 

Angie watches helplessly from dry ground, and she finally speaks. “Luka. Run get Misha. Tell him what has happened.”

There has not been a master healer since before Evgeni was born, but Misha reads in three languages and had tended the midwife in her declining years and he knows more than most.

It takes longer for Misha to come than Evgeni would have expected. They have the man out of the water by then, moved to Evgeni’s room and wrapped in a cocoon of blankets. He has fallen into a slumber but Evgeni is not sure if it is healthful, natural, or not. 

Misha comes with the pack that the last doctor left. They’ve been sure to keep the herbs fresh and the bandages clean. He also brings a pot of steaming water, and cups to drink it from. He examines the man as Angie and Luka go to the kitchen to bring back oven-warmed metal plates to heat the bed and the room. 

“The cold is in him,” Misha says. “We will do what we can.”

He sends Luka off to the gardens and then Misha and Evgeni get to work, binding the man’s chest in strips of cloth and then smearing the cloth with mustard paste. Luka comes back from the garden with a cabbage and half a dozen heads of fresh garlic. Angie slices the garlic with her bright knife to keep down the illness in the air while the man is vulnerable. Misha dots the swollen wrist with iodine before wrapping it in cabbage leaves and then bandages. They lay leaves against his bruised face and his split lip.

They bundle the man in blankets again. Misha checks a few times, and then declares the plaster has done as much as it can without burning the patient. They unwrap him again, wipe his chest with warm water, then replace the blankets. Evgeni holds him up while they get some chamomile and mint tea down his throat, and then they have done all they can. 

Luka and Angie eventually leave. 

“Are you sure this was wise?” Misha asks as Evgeni sits and watches his guest sleep.

“No,” Evgeni says, and for some reason it brings a smile to his lips. “I’m not sure at all.”

Silence stretches, close and comfortable.

“His people wouldn’t take him?” Misha asks, and Evgeni shakes his head. 

“Above is madness,” Misha says, “I don’t know how you can stand to walk among them, even for a little while.”

Misha stands with him, hand upon Evgeni’s shoulder, watching him watch the man. “Be well, my friend,” he says at last, and returns to his own family, his own duties.

==========

 

Mario goes back to the hotel room after seeing the team off, a weight on his shoulders and a hollowness in his chest. He calls Nathalie, because he absolutely cannot let her hear this on the news, that the young man who’s been like a second son to them for the past four years has gone missing. 

She takes the news with the compassion and strength that has always been the cornerstone of his love for her. He hears her breath catch, once, and then she asks “Do you need me to come out?” 

It’s tempting. To have her hand in his as they deal with the police and the press conference they’ve scheduled. But having her fly out feels too much like admitting this is going to be still going on half a day from now, and he doesn’t want to acknowledge that even as a possibility.

“No,” he says, and knows she can hear the regret, the longing in his voice. “No, stay with the kids; they’ll need you too.” 

He doesn’t want to think about how close his whole family has become to Sid, how deep it will cut the lives of him and everyone he loves if something has happened.

“I love you,” Nathalie tells him, and he holds tight to his phone and listens to her breathe. 

“I love you too,” he promises. “I’ll call you the minute I hear anything.”

He hangs up after she does, and stares at his phone for a long time before moving down his contacts list to one marked _Crosbys Home_. 

===========

The nostril-burning reek of garlic is the first thing Sid is aware of—that and the near suffocating heat of the quilts over him, a warm dry heat that’s hotter than his own body temperature could account for. He struggles against the weight of them, wincing when his wrist protests the movement. The sharp stab of pain draws him further awake, and he opens his eyes to a dull golden glow.

The room is small, cozy, decorated with every surface textured, ornamented. The barrel-domed ceiling above him is painted in swirls of yellow and gold, the walls tiled in byzantine patterns of ceramics. On the short end of the room is an arched door, heavy and wood, cracked open a few inches. He can’t see the floor from the low bed he’s lying on, but he can see the legs of an ornately carved table and the wing-back chair beside it. The light-source is on the table, a cut-glass kerosene lamp, tiny flame glowing bright. 

A man works in the glow of the small flame. Dark head down and big hands steady. His eyes flick towards Sid once and then turn back to his task. Pale blue cloth is held in his left hand, and his right guides a tiny needle through the fabric in quick even stitches. Calm, and Sid thinks he might have panicked if the man hadn’t been there. He looks so normal, in a t-shirt and blue jeans. More plain than handsome, but his eyes are gentle and his body fit. 

Sid tries to remember what happened, but it’s all disjointed images. There was the fight in the alley and then trying to find the club again. Cold air, scalding water and people speaking something that sounded like Russian. 

He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know how long he’s been gone. They’ve got a game in two days. Or two days from the last clear memory he has.

He needs…fuck. He needs to call his team. Mario will be frantic, Bylsma will be pissed. He can’t believe he did that, just walked out on his guys. He shifts around, gets his good elbow under him and pushes up.

The man looks over again, finishes up the last stitches, loops through to make a knot and bites off the loose end of the thread. He puts the needle carefully into a small wooden box and shakes the cloth out. A shirt. Sid’s shirt. He offers it over to Sidney, not quite making eye contact. Sid takes the shirt, but he’s sure he won’t be able to dress himself. He shifts in the bed again, trying to take stock of his injuries. The wrist is bad, but maybe not as broken as he remembers thinking. Also, it’s wrapped in leaves. Weird. Ribs are angry. Face hurts. Individually, none is the worst injury he’s ever taken. He just can’t remember ever being so banged up _everywhere._

The man says something, not in English, and Sid shakes his head. No concussion, he thinks, and thank god for small favors. Also no hangover. He doesn’t know what that means for the amount of time he’s been unconscious. Nothing good, as far as he can figure.

“How feel?” the man says, trying again. Sid licks his lips, tongue catching on the raw copper where the skin is broken. The man pours tea from a floral porcelain tea pot into a mug that declares his love of tropical fish and offers it over. Sid sips the tea, wondering if he’s lost his mind somewhere in his misadventures. He can’t make all the pieces fit, the inconsistencies distracting him from the focus he needs to make this all make sense. 

“Sore,” he says at last, because that he’s sure of. “Where am I?” 

“Doma,” the man answers. His voice is low and kind, and Sid resists the feeling of safety just the sound of it gives him. The word means nothing to Sid; he doesn’t know Newark well enough to recognize the name and he stores it away in case it matters later.

“How did I get here?” he asks, trying to fit the broken ends of his memories with his current situation. This is no homeless squat; he’s seen enough television to know that much. 

“You hurt,” the man says, “We find. Try to take to the autsaydery but nobody help. So bring Doma. Warm.”

“Thank you,” Sid says and passes back the mug. He gets his good arm into the sleeve of his shirt and the man moves forward to help him with the other. “I’m…I’m Sidney,” he says, and offers his hand, and the man wraps it in both of his for a moment before letting go again.

“Evgeni Domovich,” he says, “Zhenya.” And Sid has played in a league with Russians for long enough to know that the one name is the diminutive of the other, but it seems too soon to use it, even with it being offered. 

“Evgeni,” he says, and smiles even though he could use a Percocet and half a gallon of coffee right about now. “Thank you,” he says again, “So much. But is there a phone I could use?” 

Evgeni frowns and cocks his head to the side. “Phone?” he repeats, and Sid makes the universal thumb and pinky telephone gesture.

“Phone?” He tries again, just in case he mumbled. “Telephone?” Evgeni just looks blank. He makes the gesture back but his expression is uncomprehending and Sid resists the urge to panic. 

“Is there someone else?” Sid asks, “Can you take me to someone who might know where a phone is?” 

Evgeni shakes his head, and Sid thinks it was worth a shot. 

“Can you take me back to where you found me?” Sid asks, because it’s not ideal, not as comfortable as calling for a cab to come get him, but sober in the daylight he’s sure he can find something. If not a landmark that’ll get him back to the club or hotel, then at least a shop that’ll let him use the phone. 

“No.” Evgeni frowns. “Was most shitty, Sidney, most. Hurt. Left. Bad place. Bad people.” 

His stomach takes a dive, and Sid fumbles to button his shirt up. “I have to,” he says, hoping he can make Evgeni understand. “My friends, my team. They’re looking for me. They’re worried, I’m sure. I have to get back to them.”

Evgeni lowers his head, and looks just _disapointed_ at Sid’s decision. He sighs. “Come. Put clothes on. We go, we eat, then we try.” 

And again it’s not the exact answer Sid wanted, the “Okay, right away” he was hoping for, but it wasn’t a flat refusal either, and he can’t quite imagine this gentle man trying to keep him a prisoner. 

Evgeni passes him his socks and pants and underwear, and a battered pair of boots that are definitely not his, but look about the right size. Sid tries not to think too much about wearing someone else’s footwear. 

Sid gets dressed while Evgeni gets a battery-powered camp-lantern off of a shelf and turns it on. He blows out the kerosene flame and then leads Sid through the door. 

Sid isn’t sure what he’s expecting. The hall is dark, linoleum tiles on the floor, burned-out fluorescents overhead. They turn right out of Evgeni’s door and that seems to be the last chance to make a decision. They pass wire-reinforced glass windows at one point, but the other side is too dirty to see more than a vague glow through them. It’s creepy as hell, and then the tunnel turns and the floor is cobblestones and the walls brick and the ceiling wooden beams. It turns again and is smooth plaster with marble tiles underfoot. 

Sid is moving like an old man, bruised and aching with every step. 

There is no branching of the tunnel, no intersections. Evgeni frowns beside him. “Sidney,” he says like a reproach, “Come. Think with stomach.” 

Maybe that’s weird Russian for “Hurry up, I’m hungry,” so Sid picks up the pace as much as he’s able. They walk some more, and the walls of the tunnel are rough-hewn stone. But he smells something. Bread, fresh-baked, rich and yeasty. It feels warmer here and when the tunnel bends again there is a glow ahead of them. 

The hall opens into a broad kitchen, huge wooden tables down the middle and along the long walls, massive iron-faced ovens along the back wall, and a hand-pump water-faucet beside a sink bigger than the bathtub in the house Sid grew up in. 

There are maybe a dozen people there, women with their hair wrapped up in kerchiefs, men with aprons on over their bright shirts and loose trousers. Some are busy with the bread, shaping the last loaves while the previous batches are taken from the ovens. Others stir huge pots of stew and others still are taking away used implements for cleaning. 

Children run around underfoot, stealing a twist of raw dough to play with under the table or snatching a biscuit to nibble on. 

It is chaos, and Sid knows that a lot of the world is weird to him, that he doesn’t know much besides hockey, but he couldn’t have imagined this place, people like this. 

“This is…” he starts to say, but has no idea what the rest of that thought would be. Evgeni takes another step forward and waits patiently for Sid to join him.

“Is good place, Sidney,” he assures. “Is good people.”

“Zhenya!” a little voice calls, and Evgeni looks away from Sidney as a small child runs down the table’s bench seat and leaps into his arms with a tinkling of tiny bells. He swings her in a circle and makes devouring “Ra rah rah” sounds against her neck and she laughs bright and high. She is a beautiful child, with dark hair and skin, eyes as dark as Evgeni’s. 

“Sidney,” Evgeni says and turns the girl to him. “Is my Prosya,” he says. Sid waves awkwardly at her and she hides against Evgeni’s neck.

The people notice them after that, some staring with open curiosity at Sid while others glance over between jobs. A woman leaves the workers, tiny and weathered, with eyes such a pale blue they look almost clear.

She walks straight to Sid and grabs hold of his shirt-front, drawing him down to her level. He looks to Evgeni for support or guidance, but all he gets in return is a knowing smirk.

The old woman turns Sid’s head this way and that, her fingers firm against his jaw, but not pressing against any of his injuries. 

She finally says something, straight to Sid like she expects him to understand her. “What? I don’t—Evgeni? What is she saying?”

Evgeni chuckles. “She say you biggest kid she ever see.”

The woman takes Sid’s hand and pats it reassuringly and leads him to a corner of the table. Evgeni follows, still carrying the little girl, and then a bowl of some delicious-smelling soup is put in front of Sid and all he can focus on is filling his stomach. 

Evgeni leaves Prosya at the table for a minute, and comes back with a plate of black beans and fried eggs and a slab of dark bread. He lets the girl crawl onto his lap and shares his meal with her. They talk in Russian and Sid is glad for the reprieve, for the chance to get his feet under him. 

A man comes by the table, meets Sid’s eyes and smiles and leaves a bright-painted wooden top there beside his bowl. Another comes and sets down a perfectly ripe peach. 

Evgeni laughs and scolds the second one, and the woman who comes next and leaves a small package wrapped in wax paper, and the little boy who tries to give him a stuffed doll. 

“What is this?” Sid asks. It’s not necessarily weirder than things fans have done for him before, but he gets the feeling nobody here has a clue who he is. 

“Is gifts,” Evgeni explains. “New kids need gifts.” His lips quirk in a way that Sid kind of wants to see again, maybe sometime when he’s not beat to hell. “I say you not kid, but…” he shrugs, like he doesn’t have the next word. “I say you not stay but they gift anyway.”

Sid isn’t staying, and the thought steals his smile. 

“’Thank you,’ what is it in Russian? Spasibo?” Evgeni blinks with surprise, but then nods. He doesn’t stop Sid from solemnly thanking every other gift-bringer. By the time he’s eaten as much as he has strength to, there are half a dozen more little presents on his table. 

“Could I get you to walk me out?” Sid asks as he puts down his spoon. The idea of wandering Newark alone is not at all appealing, but he’ll do it if he has to. Assuming he can find the door out of this place. 

Evgeni nods, somber now and Sid refuses to feel guilty for wanting to go home. Evgeni reaches and rubs Sid’s shirt between his thumb and finger. “Need more warm,” he says, and hypothermia twice in one week doesn’t sound pleasant, so Sid nods. 

“Do you have something I could borrow?” He asks, “Just for today.” 

Evgeni nods and shoos Prosya off to play with the other children. Sid struggles to his feet. Just sitting and eating has taken a lot out of him, and even though the walk back to Evgeni’s room is shorter than he remembered, he’s stumbling by the time they get back. It still reeks of garlic but he can’t bother to care. He sits down on the bed, just to rest a moment while Evgeni opens a chest and digs through some clothes, and then can’t resist laying down flat. 

“If I could just use a phone…” he mumbles, and his eyes slip closed. He feels Evgeni swing his legs up onto the bed and his sure fingers loosen the laces of Sid’s borrowed boots. 

He wakes once, briefly, in the dark and quiet. There’s a warm weight draped over his waist, and he reaches, expecting to feel an arm but finds a little knee instead. He cracks his eyes open. The lantern is turned down low, the barest steady glow. Evgeni is stretched out on the other edge of the bed on top of the covers, and Prosya is lying across them both, her head and shoulders on Evgeni’s stomach, her legs across Sid. 

He’s not a man given to daydreams, to fantastic thoughts. He’s given up a lot for hockey, tried to forget his childhood dreams of a place he intrinsically belongs. But the moment is so perfect. A good man beside him, a child that could be his. He lies there and savors it. Lets himself pretend it is his life. That he can stay. 

He falls asleep again before he can convince himself that it isn’t real. 

=========

Evgeni smiles down at Sidney, passed out asleep again. He kneels and starts unlacing his boots. He wonders if everyone out in the world is like this, always hurrying, pushing when they should rest, or if it’s just the way Sidney is. He thinks about what it must be like for Sidney’s friends, unable to find him, no way to open a door to lead them to him. 

He wonders if Sidney is right, that they want him, that they didn’t mean to let him get lost, that they’ll be glad to find him and keep him safe from now on. 

He hopes so, but. 

Maybe it is just having a new face, someone he didn’t grow up near, someone exotic, but he wants Sidney to stay, wants to learn his language, and have him learn Evgeni’s. Wants to show him all the beautiful parts of home and take him through a hundred doors of wonder. He wants Sidney at his side the next time someone has cause for celebration, to dance and drink with him, to walk half-drunk back to this room and fall to bed together. 

He turns Sidney around on the bed so his feet will be on the mattress, and his eyelashes don’t even flutter. It amazes Evgeni, that he could be so tired and still push so hard to be taken above.

He hears the tiny jingle of bells and turns to the open door of his room, smiling as Evpraksia pokes her head around the frame. 

“Are you sleeping here tonight?” he asks her, but all of her attention is on the sleeping man in his bed.

“Is he your new child?” she asks, not returning his smile. She looks anxious, and he sits back on his chair and opens his arms to her. She climbs into his lap and he hugs her close. 

“Sidney is not staying,” he says, hoping it doesn’t sound as regretful to her as it does to him, “And he is not a child.”

“He is vzroslyy?” she asks, and he hesitates, because he doesn’t know the way Sidney’s people reckon such things, nor how he would be classified by the elders if he were to stay. To say that Sidney is not a child is not the same as saying he is adult, to be trusted. 

“No,” he finally decides on. Not vzroslyy, and leaving soon. It doesn’t matter much, exactly what Sidney is.

 

==========

The press conference is brief and to the point. Mario stands where they tell him to, back and to the left of the police lieutenant who is in charge of the case. She’s a tall lady, older than he is by a few years, with a nose and jaw so solid she was probably never considered pretty.

She’s compassionate though, and competent, and Mario feels comfortable with Sid’s case in her hands.

“I’ve called you here today, to talk about the disappearance of Sidney Crosby, of the Pittsburgh Penguins,” she starts, confirms the rumors going around that he’s disappeared and then lays out the rough facts that they know, makes the offer of reward for any information leading to the safe recovery of Mr. Crosby. 

Mario mostly tunes it out. They’re getting Sid back. None of this matters, not really.

The reporters swarm up to the podium when the official statement is done, and he answers the questions put to him in the most vague and supportive way he can, saying he has no reason to think that Sid left of his own volition, that there’s no reason for a grown man to not drink at a bar with his team, that he has every confidence in the Newark police force to find Sidney.

He’s glad as hell when the lieutenant signals the officers providing security and they usher the press out of the building. 

“How are you holding up?” Lieutenant Wallis asks when they’re gone, a supportive hand just touching his elbow and then gone again. 

“I want to find him,” he blurts. The longing for things to be right again is almost overwhelming. It’s like waiting beside Austin’s incubator all over again, watching his tiny chest rise and fall and willing him to take the next breath and the next. This desperate helpless feeling, something he can only watch, no matter how much he would do, how much he would give, to make it right again. 

“We’ll do everything in our power to—” she starts, but the buzz of his phone on vibrate cuts her off, and she smiles at him. 

“Go ahead and answer that; I need to get back to work.” 

He pulls his phone out and she turns to walk away and he makes a mad grab for her sleeve as the caller ID photo comes up.

“Sid!” he near-shouts into the phone, his heart pounding wild in his chest.

“Mario,” he hears, sort of distant, like Sid’s not holding the phone, and then a rough voice says “Four million dollars will get him back to you. Get the money ready and wait for a call.”

And then the connection drops. He hits the talk button to call back right away, but it goes straight to voice mail. Turned off again, “Damn it,” he swears, and Wallis watches him intently.

“Was that him?” She asks, and he hesitates. 

“I think so,” he says, god, Sid was just there for a second, just Mario’s name and then nothing. Did he even hear Mario’s voice? Could he have given Sid some reassurance if he’d had the presence of mind? “It. He said my name, and then a man came on. Said to get four million dollars together and he’d call back.”

“Okay,” Wallis says, strong and calm. “I know this sounds bad, but it’s not the worst case scenario. There’s a pattern to these things, and professionals who have specialized in ransom negotiations. I can call in the FBI now, and bring more resources to bear than this department has available. We’ll get your boy back.”

He nods, and tries to ignore the ache in his chest. Somebody has Sid, but he’s not dead. They know how valuable he is, and that has to count for something.

Wallis gives another officer some instructions and then takes her leave of him. “I need to make some calls,” she says, “Hawkins here will take you to our tech guy; we’re going to try to track his phone if they turn it on again, and put recording equipment on yours.”

“Okay,” he says, and he’ll do anything. He’ll wait as long as it takes. Still, every minute knowing Sid is a _hostage_ feels like an hour.

=======

Evgeni knows, when Sidney is awake before him, up and dressed with his gifted boots on, that there will be no delaying him now, no putting off his return to the outside. His injured wrist is held close to his side; lines of strain crease the skin around his eyes.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate your hospitality,” Sidney starts, and Evgeni tries to parse out the words, said rushed and anxious, “But there are people missing me. People who need me. I have to get back now. I really do.”

Evgeni nods. Can’t quite raise his eyes to look at Sidney. “I’m go get us food and then we go.”

“Okay,” says Sidney. “I’ll just wait here?” 

Evgeni gets dressed, back turned so Sidney won’t see his disappointment. He leaves his door cracked open, so Evpraksiya can go in if she wants, and heads to the kitchen. The way is easier now, without Sidney’s confusion tangling the way. It is only two doors and a dozen steps from his bed to the warmth of the hearth, the smell of cooking bread and the big pot of stew simmering on the fire. He packs up a bag for them-- rolls and fruit and a few rare sausages wrapped in waxed paper. He pumps some clear cool water into a pair of plastic bottles, twists the bright blue caps on tight. 

“Where is your new child?” Borya asks, and Evgeni shakes his head. 

“He is not a child, and not mine, and not staying.” There are winces of sympathy, and Valya pats Evgeni’s shoulder in sympathy. 

Borya looks sad, as if Evgeni is lost to him, ready to be wrapped in bright linen and salt and tucked behind a door that will never reopen. “You’re taking him back,” he says, not a question. 

Evgeni reaches out, hand touching Borya’s elbow and then his shoulder. He steps in and wraps his arms around shoulders that seem narrower by the day, bones suddenly more fragile than Evgeni remembered.

“I am of Home,” Evgeni says, low and sure, a promise. “I will come back as soon as Sidney is among his own again.”

Borya grumbles at that, vows to come after him if he takes too long, but it sounds more like worry than a threat. 

“I will come back,” Evgeni promises again, and Borya lets him go when he steps back. He gathers the last few things he thinks Sidney might need or enjoy. Valya slips a few pieces of sweet hard candy into his bag, and then Evgeni has no excuses to not return to Sidney, so he does.

Sidney is still sitting on the edge of the bed when Evgeni comes back to him, his face tight like he thought he had been abandoned here. 

“Food,” Evgeni says, and passes him some bread. Sidney stands and eats, but looks eager to be gone, eager to leave him. It is just as easy to eat while they walk, so Evgeni leads the way out of the room. He tries to recreate his thoughts the night he found Sidney, the things they were searching for, the feel of the place they had found. He walks, shapes his will, walks, turns a corner and opens a door. 

There is city beyond, snow-touched and beautiful, a place where little has changed in many years, laced through with hundreds of old walls, deep and connected. Terraced gardens rise on either side of a steep winding path. It’s dark-time, stars above, the buildings bright-lit with hundreds of tiny lights.

“This…This doesn’t look right,” Sidney says, and he reaches blind and grabs Evgeni’s wrist. Evgeni twists in his hold, and Sidney takes his hand instead. He stares for a moment, looking down. “This…where are we?” 

Evgeni shrugs. Maybe the Astronomi could say where they were, in relation to some other place above, but that has no meaning in Evgeni’s work. 

Sidney stares and looks afraid, actually afraid, and Evgeni can’t figure out why.

“Is no good we try again,” he says, and Sidney looks up at him, eyes too wide. 

“What?” 

Evgeni pulls him back through the door, back Home. There, he leads Sidney through twisting tunnels, thinks about the things Sidney needs, safety and family and his own home.

This is definitely not where he found Sidney, an enclosed space with walls overgrown with moss and vines, trees growing through the roofless rafters above them. The sun is only a little away from its zenith, the air around them warm and muggy. Evgeni tries to remember what the Astronomi had said about that, the relative distance around the curve of the world outside, but he doesn’t recall much and cannot relate it to Sidney with what little language they share.

Sidney isn’t breathing well, high harsh gasps, and Evgeni barely catches him as his knees fold up and he falls on his rump. 

“This…what the _hell_?” Sidney says, his tone bordering on despair. Evgeni remembers his first experiences outside, and sits beside him, letting him take his time and regain his bearings. He shrugs out of his coat and helps Sidney out of his. He rubs Sidney’s back as birds chirp and insects buzz. This is a good place for it, for Sidney to crash. Quiet and safe. 

“Am I crazy?” Sidney whispers, and Evgeni leans in closer. 

“Is okay,” he says, “Is all okay.”

Sidney is quiet for a long time, staring at the gently swaying leaves as a breeze brushes through them. 

“Can I. Can I get home from here?” 

Evgeni shrugs. He has no idea how far or what direction to start walking. “We go through door. I’m try to think place. Feel place. Try again. Try again again.”

“Okay,” Sidney breathes. He moves to his feet, and Evgeni is helplessly impressed with his courage. “Okay, let’s do it.”

Evgeni opens the door behind them and they step back Home.

Evgeni admires Sidney’s courage for six more attempts, six more doors that bring them somewhere Sidney doesn’t want to be. They are all beautiful places, striking visually, comfortable physically. No blazing heat or aching cold. Home leads them to the place where the streets are water, peaceful villages, abandoned places where delicate stone lattice architecture crumbles to ruin. They step out once, from a tiny house on top of the biggest wall Evgeni has ever seen, snaking like a river over the peaks of the hills around them as far as they eye can see, the moonlit sky above unobscured by city lights or even clouds.

“This isn’t _right_ ,” Sidney says, frustration evident in his voice. “I just need a _fucking phone_!” He catches himself a heartbeat later, wincing in apology. “Sorry, sorry. I know you’re trying. I know. I just. Why is it not _working_?”

Evgeni blows his breath out through his nose, no little frustrated himself. 

“Is so easy? You do then!” He throws up his hands, and then freezes. Sidney stares at him, eyes too-wide again, afraid again, and Evgeni reminds himself that Sidney comes from another place, where he has seen people strike a weaker person in anger and disregard the pain of their fellows. He hangs his head, shamed. 

“Could I?” Sidney asks, soft. Evgeni looks up at him. “Could I do it? ‘Think place, feel place?’”

The idea of it takes the frown off of Evgeni’s brow. If Sidney can find his way out, maybe he can find it back in again. 

“Could maybe,” Evgeni allows. He reaches out, and Sidney lets him take his good hand. Evgeni uses his other to close Sidney’s eyes. Sidney jerks back but then settles, lets Evgeni rest his palm lightly over his face.

“Clean head. Think. What need. What want.” He stands, breathes slow and steady until Sidney’s grip on his hand gentles. 

“Okay,” Sidney says, and Evgeni moves his hand away from Sidney’s face. He blinks, like the hall is much brighter than he’d expected. 

“Okay,” Evgeni agrees, and nudges Sidney to walk a little ahead of him, not so far that he can’t keep hold of his hand, but enough that he’s leading, that Evgeni is just trusting and following, his mind carefully empty of suggestions.

They come to a door, and Sidney hesitates, looks back at Evgeni before he opens it. 

 

============

Mario has never had a problem with waiting before. There was always something to do while he did— teammates to lead, plays to plan, tape to watch. 

It’s been a long time since he had to sit on the sidelines. This isn’t his call, isn’t his team to lead, isn’t even his game. The police and FBI pack the surveillance van, taking the money Mario put together and planning the drop. Four million dollars, and he’ll call it a bargain if they lose the money but get Sid back. 

One of the agents checks the pack again, the GPS and the exploding ink packets, and then holds it out for Mario to take. 

He feels like a sleep-walker, moving towards the park bench he’s supposed to leave the backpack on, hyper-aware of every person around him, heart pounding in his chest. He imagines he can hear the irregular thump of it; this is more stress than his doctor ever wanted him to have again. 

He sets the bag down, takes a deep breath, and walks on without looking back, just like the caller instructed him to. One of the female agents he’d seen in the van crosses his path at the next intersection of park sidewalks, pushing an empty baby carriage. 

“You’re doing fine,” she intones as she matches pace with him. He takes a deep breath. “Just keep walking.”

He walks, and the van picks them up around the next turn.

“The ransom was picked up by a local homeless man seconds after you left it,” Lieutenant Wallis tells him. “They’re following him to see where he takes it.”

Mario rests his head in his hands and tries to breathe through it, the helpless waiting. 

Another fifteen minutes go by, listening to the agents following the money, seeing a hand-off, preparing to apprehend. Then a squawk of activity bursts from the radios, people yelling, gunshots. 

“Suspect down!” comes a call. “We need an ambulance!”

“What was that?” Mario demands, “What the fuck was that?”

“We need you to sit down and wait,” Wallis tells him, not unkindly, but very firm.

They drive him back to the station, to sit in the waiting room and wait again.

Wallis brings him coffee when she comes back. 

“The suspect pulled a gun when they tried to apprehend him. He was shot and wounded, and they’ve got him in surgery right now. He didn’t say anything useful before he lost consciousness. Mr. Crosby was not found at the site of the confrontation. We’re not sure where he is being held. If he still is.”

“If…” The word digs deep in his chest like a blade, the thought that Sidney could already be…gone. 

“We’re doing everything we possibly can,” Wallis says, but the words sound like empty promises.

=========  
There is a bell in front of them, nearly half Sid’s height, weathered bronze. A little roof above, and an open view of a snow-covered courtyard all around, snow shining white in the afternoon sun. 

“Oh,” says Sid, and Evgeni’s hand is the only point of stability in his world. “This. This is Shattuck. The bell-tower. I. I kissed Jack here.”

He feels like he’s hit his head, trying to reconcile things that are impossible with things that are happening. He’s at Shattuck. Of all the unbelievable places Evgeni has brought him, this is the most startling, the most real and surreal at the same time, a place Evgeni could not have known to take them. Sid must have done this, thinking of somewhere safe and comforting, somewhere secret and secure. He leans against the corner post, knees buckling as he slides down and sits, letting the low walls obscure his vision of the outside world. His wrist is throbbing and he feels a little light-headed.

Evgeni settles beside him, digs in his bag and brings out some bread, an unlabeled bottle of water with the safety-seal broken. Sid takes it one-handed and drinks, nibbles on the bread to settle his stomach. 

“This is Shattuck,” Sid says again, takes a breath and lets it out slow. “I went to school here.” 

Evgeni nods, watching Sid’s face like he’s trying to understand why that’s important. 

“I could find a phone,” Sid says. “I could go down and anybody I asked would give me a phone.” 

Evgeni’s lips press together, like the idea isn’t the happiest. 

“But then I’d have to explain how I got here. And I don’t know how I got here.”

“Doors,” Evgeni explains, like that helps at all. 

“Could we. If I tried again, could we get closer to Newark?” 

Evgeni shrugs. Sid considers.

“If we leave here, can I get back later?”

“Yes maybe yes,” Evgeni says. Sid can see him searching for words, and waits while he finds them. Evgeni taps on the bell, too light to make it ring. “This good, yes, special to you?” Sid nods. “Easier find,” Evgeni says. He touches Sid’s forehead with one finger. “Door is attach.”

So. He can try to avoid the questions, avoid the weirdness. Try to get closer to a place that makes sense. He closes his eyes, focuses in. What the hell is there in Newark? The Prudential center is a good start, and he tries to ‘think place, feel place,’ picturing every detail of it, the back entrance where the bus drops them off, the walk to the visitor’s changing rooms, the way the halls echo, the exact cold of it.

“Home first,” Evgeni tells him, and Sid makes a noise that sounds pained even to himself. Of course home first. Because he’s not a magical dude that can just teleport where he wants to be. Home, back through the door he got here through, and then out again, to the Prudential center. 

“Close eye,” Evgeni tells him, and guides his fingers to the wall, and Sid focuses on Home, on the smell of bread, on the warm weight of Evgeni’s quilt, and he finds the crack, finds the edge and pushes in, away from the harsh Minnesota cold to someplace _other_.

The hallways of Home are starting to feel familiar, even though he’s pretty sure he’s never seen this one before. Something in the smell, some property of the air. 

He goes back to his focusing on the Prudential Center, and they walk, walk some more. There’s nothing, no exit, no door.

“What am I doing wrong?” Sid finally asks. 

Evgeni shrugs. “Where you go?”

“Prudential Center.”

“What is Prudential Center?”

Sid blinks. “Uh, it’s where I play hockey when I’m in Newark.”

“What is hockey?”

Sid chokes on air, shakes his head. “Wow. I…Okay.”

And he starts to describe the Center, because if he starts telling someone utterly clueless about hockey, he’ll be here forever. 

He gets to the part about the tunnel to the rink, and Evgeni is shaking his head. “But is good place? Roots place? Or vremennyy?”

“I don’t know what that is,” Sid says, fighting the growing tide of frustration again. 

“Vremennyy is…just made,” Evgeni says, “No root.”

Sid takes a sharp breath, puzzles that one out. 

“So…somewhere older. Right? How old is old?”

Evgeni shrugs. 

“That doesn’t help,” Sid complains, but. He thinks back. He likes history. There has to be something he can remember, some landmark. The oldest thing he can think of is that church Duper wanted to visit once, and it sure as hell looked old; he’s just not sure if it really is. 

He tries to remember, the pointy parts and the big round stained-glass windows, the stone lattice, the scent of candles. He starts walking, Evgeni at his shoulder, and around the next corner is a door, not large, but wooden, old and heavy-looking. He takes a deep breath and pushes, and the door creaks back.

They step out into multi-colored light, an image of a saint rendered in stained glass in front of them. The hallway sweeps around to the side, and Sid thinks he got the church part right; he’s just not sure it’s the right one.

“We should go out. Find a sign or something.” 

Evgeni nods, although he doesn’t seem enthusiastic about the idea. Sid leads the way, and they walk like they belong there, down the aisle, between parishioners and tourists, and out the front door. 

Sid doesn’t recognize the street names, but there’s what looks to be a huge park in front of them, and a neighborhood of tight-packed row houses to the left. “This looks familiar,” he says, and Evgeni nods, lips pressed tight. It feels weird to go back into the church and ask for a phone. Somehow profane. 

“Hey, come with me while I look for a phone I can use?” Sid asks as they stand on the front steps. The wind cuts cold even through his coat, and he wants to berate his drunk self for going out in weather like that. 

Evgeni shakes his head, shifts his feet uncomfortably. “No. I’m go back.” He gestures with his thumb, and Sid’s chest aches at the thought that this could be it, the last time they see each other. 

“Please,” he says, knowing it’s selfish, knowing he has no right to ask. He feels like a little kid, begging for one more minute on the ice before they have to go in. “Just walk with me until I find a store?” 

Evgeni’s lips twitch around an indulgent smile held in check, but he nods and steps down.

They walk out to the sidewalk and turn away from the park, and it’s only a few blocks later they find a place marked “New Family Grocery,” the windows too covered with colorful photographs of fruits and vegetables to see inside. There’s an advertising postcard on the door for an art opening at a Newark gallery.

Sid opens the door and Evgeni hesitates, uncertain at the threshold. 

“Come on,” Sid says, feeling better by the minute. “It’s my turn to play guide now.”

They step inside, the light seeming dim after the bright sun outdoors. The middle-age man behind the counter looks up, and Sid puts on his best media smile. 

“Hi,” he starts, and the guy is staring at him. “I was wondering if I could use your phone? I lost mine, and I need to call a friend for a ride.”

The guy doesn’t even blink, eyes wide as he reaches under the counter and pulls out a dingy cordless handset. “You’re Sidney Crosby,” he says, and Sid ducks his head, embarrassed to have to borrow a phone, to be so rumpled and travel-worn. 

“Can I sign something for you?” he asks. 

The guy shakes his head. “Make your call,” he says, “Oh my god, Sidney Crosby…”

Evgeni stands wide-eyed, looking as out of place as Sid had felt in Home. Sid dials Mario’s number from memory, heart beating as he listens to it ring. Mario’s is the only number he has memorized; his parents had moved last year and he’s too used to their new number being on his cell. If this doesn’t work, he’s not sure what he’s going to do. No money, no phone, no car. Can he get to the hotel? Will they recognize him there? Can he justify calling 911 to have someone come get him?

“Hello?” Mario sounds off, tired and wary.

“Mario!” Sid says. He hadn’t realized exactly how terrified he was, until suddenly he has Mario’s voice in his ear, sounding like home and safety, and he really is going to be okay. 

“Mario, it’s Sid. I…”

“Sid! Sid, where are you? Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” Sid breathes, “Yeah, I’m okay. A little banged up. The trainers are gonna…”

“Sid, where are you? Are you alone?” 

“I’m uh, at a little store by the Cathedral Basilica. New Family Grocery. I’m not alone,” he assures Mario, but then stumbles over what to say about Evgeni. “One of the…anyway, no, someone’s here with me.”

“Okay,” Mario says, “Okay, just sit tight. They’ll come get you. It’s going to be okay.”

Sid nods. What else was he going to do? Go walking again and end up in a subterranean other-world with magical doors that transport him around the world in a single day? 

“Yeah,” Sid says, his voice high and strained. “Yeah, okay, I’ll stay here.”

There’s a beep on the phone, like another call coming through.

“Hey, Mario, I gotta go.”

“Sid, wait!” Mario says, but Sid’s thumb hits a button as he’s handing the phone back to the shopkeeper and his voice disappears.

The man takes his phone and is still staring star-struck and Sid feels a little creepy about keeping him from his work, so he nudges Evgeni’s shoulder and they go outside to wait. 

“I should give you your coat back,” Sid says, “and your boots.” 

Evgeni shrugs. “Keep now, bring again later.”

It hadn’t even occurred to Sid, that he could see Evgeni again. 

“How…how can I find you?” 

Evgeni smiles, eyes gentle and his homey face almost-handsome. “Think place, feel place. Start in good old house with roots. Make a door and find Home. Find me.”

A siren howls in the distance, urgent and angry, but the whole world feels so far away right now, just Sid and Evgeni standing together in the cold. 

“I will,” he promises. He thinks maybe Evgeni will like that. That he wants Sidney to come and visit again.

Evgeni reaches out and squeezes Sid’s fingertips. The siren comes closer, and Sid realizes that it’s more than one, coming from more than one direction, getting closer, all of them getting closer. 

“What the…” 

Police cars roar in from both directions of both cross-streets, ambulances following. Officers spill out of the cars, guns drawn. Evgeni draws himself up and looks around frantic, but there’s nowhere to run to, no escape. He balls his hands up into fists and no, oh shit no.

“Evgeni!” Sid yells, “No! No, you can’t fight them. You can’t fight; they’ll kill you!”

He shoves Evgeni back, puts his body between the police and him. He puts his hands behind his head, “Like this. Stand like this, please, please, or they’ll kill you.”

“We’re not armed!” Sid yells, desperate. The shouted orders of the officers make a cacophony of noise that even he can’t make sense of. “He doesn’t speak English! Stop!”

Evgeni looks terrified, shouting in Russian as the cops swarm up to them. 

There is a pause, like everyone is taking a breath at the same time.

“It’s okay,” Sid says into that moment, and then the noise crashes in on him again. 

One of the cops reaches out and grabs his arm, spinning him away from Evgeni and behind another with a riot shield. Sid hears himself yelp at the pain in his bad arm and Evgeni bellows his name, tries to charge through to Sid’s side. 

“Stop it!” Sidney screams as they beat Evgeni down, as he disappears behind a wall of blue uniforms and black flack jackets. “Don’t hurt him! God damn it, stop!” 

Sid struggles to stay, but he’s got an officer at each side now, manhandling him out of the danger zone, towards the ambulance. 

“You’re safe now, Mr. Crosby,” one of them tells him and he wants to punch the man in the mouth. He was plenty safe before they showed up, thank you very much.

They put him on the ambulance’s bumper and an EMT starts looking him over. There’s a noise of protest from the side, and then Mario is rushing up, looking years older than he did when Sid saw him last, old and tired and red-eyed. 

He rushes in and shoulders between the EMT and Sid and wraps Sid in his strong arms, holds him tight enough that Sid groans for breath, his bruised ribs a sharp ache.. “Mario,” he gasps, “Mario, I’m okay, what the hell? What are they doing?” 

“It’s okay,” Mario says, “You’re safe.”

“I was safe a minute ago, too!” Sid protests, disoriented and confused as Mario and an officer put Sid into the back seat of an unmarked car. “Evgeni, what are they doing to him? They have to let him go. What the hell!” 

“We’ll get this all straightened out,” Mario says, and Sid doubts him for the first time because Mario isn’t fucking listening to him. 

“What the hell is going on?” Sid demands as the car pulls away from the curb, sudden quiet as they leave the police and Evgeni behind them.

“Take us to the hotel,” Mario orders the driver, and the man nods. 

“We’ll have a team doctor there to meet us,” Mario assures him. “The police will want a statement, but that can wait until you’ve been checked out.” 

He looks so earnest, so scared. Sid feels like his feet have been swept from under him, like the world he stepped out into makes even less sense than the one Evgeni shared with him.

“What. The hell. Is going on?” Sid asks, one last time, and Mario blinks at him like Sid has deviated from the script. 

“You were kidnapped,” Mario says, slow like Sid’s got a head injury. “They tried to ransom you for four million dollars.”

Sid barks out a laugh, finds the idea too ludicrous to wrap his head around.

“I didn’t get kidnapped. I got. I got drunk, Mario. I got drunk and wandered off and got kind of lost. I know, I know I shouldn’t have been so dumb and I’m sorry I fucked up, but I was never kidnapped.”

Mario pats his hand, but doesn’t look reassured at all. Doesn’t look like he’s hearing the words coming out of Sid’s mouth.

“I would have froze to death,” Sid says. “I was. I remember falling down, and I didn’t have my coat anymore, and I just. I couldn’t _think_ anymore. They saved me. Evgeni…”

“They?” Mario cuts in, and Sid grits his teeth; he didn’t mean to make this more complicated than it has to be. 

“Nobody hurt me,” Sid says, firm and sure. “Nobody kidnapped me. Nobody kept me anywhere against my will.” 

“The whole city was looking for you, Sid,” Mario says, “Where the hell _were_ you?”

Sid shakes his head, looks down at his wrist, where the leaves of cabbage wrapped around his arm are tattered from the rough treatment. “I’m not sure I could find it again. Just. There were some people. Maybe…maybe homeless. They took me in. Did their best to take care of me.”

Mario looks at him, like he can see through the lie if he looks long enough, and Sid tries to convince himself that it wasn’t a lie, not really. Just a simplification. 

“There’s a team doctor waiting for us,” Mario says again, “I’ll keep the police from bothering you as long as I can.”

That sounds really really good, hiding from the attention, the questions, the press. 

“No,” Sid says instead, because every minute he spends avoiding his duties is a minute Evgeni spends in jail. “The sooner we can clear this up, the better.”

 

============  
Outside has always been a place Evgeni distrusts, a place where the rules are incomprehensible, where invisibility is the best defense.

For Sidney, he goes outside, into a store while people are awake, attentive. He trails a finger against the doorframe but it is inert, hollow. Too young for connection, for depth. 

Inside, Sidney finds the phone he’d been so long searching for, a beige block that he speaks urgent words into. Evgeni would laugh; he’s seen such a thing often, just never known it’s purpose or value. Sidney seems so relieved, and Evgeni would be shamed to admit it, that he could have gotten one sooner, found one easier, if he’d known the word. Perhaps he should have taken Sidney to Misha, who knows many words even though he never ventures Out. 

They go to stand on the curb, and Evgeni feels as exposed as he did on his first journey above, the nearest Door so far away. But Sidney is here, and it won’t hurt to stay until his companion comes, this Mario whose name he spoke with such urgency. 

Sidney speaks of returning the coat and boots, and Evgeni is glad that he will return, that Evgeni will see him again. 

He doesn’t notice the sounds of the city until Sidney’s head jerks up, until the sirens close in on either side, until the soldiers rush in on them. Sidney is shouting, at Evgeni, at the others, terror in his voice. The soldiers are giving orders, an incomprehensible wave of noise. 

Sidney is torn from him, crying out in pain, and Evgeni has never struck another person in his life, but he does now, a roar of fear and fury rising from his throat. 

“Sidney! No!” he howls, swings his fist to punch the soldier closest, but the man’s helmet catches the blow, hard like stone and Evgeni feels the bright crack of it go through the bones of his hand.

“Sidney!” 

A club swings down, and he raises his arm to guard his head but they beat it down in two strokes, and then the impacts rain down on him like hail, like a rock slide. 

They pick him up and there’s no fight left to him. Roll him over and lock his arms behind him. Put him inside one of their vehicles and he finds new strength in the sheer terror that goes through him. The thing growls around him and begins to move and he kicks at the door, at the partition between himself and the soldiers. 

“Let me go,” he begs, “Let me go to Sidney. Please. We’ve done no harm; we mean you no harm.” He knows the words are wrong, not in the language of Detroit, but he cannot find the right ones and nobody is listening to him. 

The car takes him to a low dreary building, and the soldiers bully him inside, through incomprehensible rituals, taking prints of his fingertips, making him stand against a striped wall while they point a box at him. Stripping him of his clothes and forcing him into others. They take him to a small room and chain him to a table. A man comes in and shouts at him. Something about Evgeni taking Sidney, demanding gifts for his return. It makes no sense.

“Please,” Evgeni begs, soft now, “I want to go home. Sidney, he’s hurt. You have to let me go to him. You have to let me help him.”

He struggles, to find the words in their language, drawing them halting and broken through his injured body. 

The man goes out, and Evgeni lays his head on the table and weeps, lost and battered. He should never have come. Never have let Sidney come. They would have been safe in Home’s sheltering arms. 

Later, the door opens again. The man returns, this time with a woman at his side, tall and slim, dressed in the sharp angles and rigid lines like the soldiers wear. Only the color is softer, a muted gray. 

“I am Inessa Dmitriyevna Yezhо́v,” she says, the familiar roll of words falling easy from her lips. He looks up at that, eyes wide and startled. 

He wants to hope, but he looks her over again, at her rigid bearing, her crisp clothes, and his optimism falters and dies.

“Do you understand?” she asks, and he half-shrugs. 

“You are not of Home,” he says, disappointed. She has nothing to offer him.

“I am a translator for the Newark PD. The FBI have asked for me to help with this investigation by translating for you. I am neither an officer of the law nor your attorney. Do you understand?”

He shakes his head, “I need to go Home,” he says, “Please. Please help me.”

She murmurs to the man, who focuses his attention on Evgeni. “The only way we can help you is if you tell us the whole truth,” the man says, and then the woman repeats it, in her muddled version of Evgeni’s home tongue. 

He doesn’t understand, not really. But if Evgeni’s story will help, will make them understand that they should let him go, let Sid go, he will tell it. 

==========

 

Sid gave his first media interview at seven years old. He knows how to be calm, poised, certain. He knows how to talk without saying much, how to keep on message. He never thought he’d use those skills while being interviewed by the authorities, but here he is, saying over and over “No, I never felt forced to stay. I was injured and disoriented. When I said I wanted to leave, Evgeni agreed to walk me to a phone,” and “I know my phone was lost before Evgeni found me. I’m certain. I needed it and couldn’t find it.”

The FBI agent takes careful notes, even though Sid is sure they’re recording this. 

“I am _sure_ I wasn’t kidnapped,” Sid says. “I am _not_ pressing charges. You need to be looking at whoever got my phone and not a good Samaritan who helped me out when he didn’t have to. I would like to pay Evgeni’s bail now, and leave.”

The agent purses his lips. He acts like Sid is being the difficult one, like Sid is making this harder than it needs to be. 

“I’m afraid that won’t happen. Mr. Malkin is an undocumented immigrant. He’s being deported.”

“Deported _where_?” Sid snaps back, a little sharper than he should have, judging by the agent’s suspicious look. 

“Wherever he came from,” the agent says, and Sid wants to laugh and wish him luck with that. 

“Is there anything else you need from me?” Sid asks, and no, they have everything now, as little as it was.

The hotel room is dull and sterile when Mario brings Sid back there. 

“I want to go home,” he says, and Mario nods.

“That’s for the best. There’s nothing more to be done here.”

Sid packs his suitcase one-handed, and Mario calls for a bellhop to bring their things down. 

He leaves Newark feeling like he left part of himself behind.

——————————

Nathalie’s oldest son comes home, and she hugs him just inside the door. Light because of his injuries, but long because she had been so scared, so worried she’d never see him again. 

“I’m okay,” he murmurs into her hair, and leans into the hug. 

She nods and dabs at her eyes, steps back and lets him come into the house. “Come on; I made your favorite pot pie. Your parents are on the way; they should be here tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he says, and she hates the sound of it. She’s heard him tired before, worn from games and media events. But not like this, dull and empty. He moves like a robot, emptying his luggage and taking part of the dirty clothes to the laundry, another pile into the stack for the dry-cleaners. 

She can’t sleep that night, walking the halls of her domain, restlessly searching for something amiss, something she can fix. Sid hasn’t moved his laundry to the dryer so he does it for him, and when it comes out she folds it all, the warm clean smell soothing her frayed nerves.

She doesn’t see the stitches, doesn’t know they’re there until her fingers brush over the odd seam, little raised y shapes repeating even and steady as bricks in a wall. She frowns, and picks up the shirt, turns it to the light, checks the inside. It was definitely torn, and then expertly repaired. The other shoulder too, has the same tiny stitches, making it match even though there was no damage there. 

She checks the collar for Sid’s 87 and finds it. This is…a level of care that feels special, important. Someone caring for Sid. 

She stacks his things and heads upstairs. The crack under Sid’s door is lit from within, so she taps on it, listens for his call to come in. 

He’s laying on his bed, even though it’s late, the sling for his wrist beside him, the other arm thrown over his eyes. She takes the second to really look at him, the dejected air about him, the sorrow twisting his lips. 

Added together, what she’s seeing is uniquely Sid and a universal affliction as old as time.

“I brought your clothes up,” she says, and sits on the edge of the bed. 

He looks up long enough to thank her, polite even as he’s wrapped up in his own misery.

She smooths her hand over the decorative stitches, takes a breath.

“I brought your shirt up. The one you were wearing. I wasn’t sure. If it had bad associations though.”

“No,” Sid says. “No, it’s fine.”

She smiles then, a mother’s smile. “Whoever fixed it did a good job. It looks like the left sleeve was almost torn off.”

Sid moves his arm away from his face and sits up, takes the cloth in hand. 

“Evgeni,” he says. “He was stitching it, the first time I woke up.”

Something in him firms up then, spine straightening, his jaw clenching. “Thanks, Nathalie. I need… I need to figure some stuff out.”

He stands up and hugs her one-armed, ducks his head so she can kiss his forehead.

He heads for his laptop then, and she leaves him too it, trusting he’s got enough sense to not make things worse.

————————

“This phone call is covered by attorney-client privilege, right?” Sid asks, knowing that sounds sketchy but he needs to make sure. 

“Of course,” the man on the other end answers. 

“I just need to explore all avenues,” Sid says, not making it any better. He focuses himself, figures out what he wants.

“What happens to someone being detained for immigration offenses, if his country of origin can’t be determined?” he asks, and the lawyer goes off on a list of possibilities, most of which boil down to indefinite detention.

Sid nods to himself. That’s about what he thought.

“And if the person was accused of a crime in the US?”

“They’d have to be tried, and if found guilty, serve their sentence before they could be deported.”

“Where would that be, in Newark?”

The lawyer pauses. “Where?”

“What courthouse?” Sid looks down at his list of research, at the addresses and the dates built. “The preliminary hearing, where would it be?”

“Veteran’s, probably.” 

Sid takes a breath. “Second most likely?” 

“Historic.”

Sid can do this. It might suck. Evgeni might hate him forever. But he won’t spend indefinite time waiting for immigration to accomplish an impossible task.

“Thank you. That’ll be all.”

“Wait! Mister Cros…” the lawyer starts, but Sid is already hanging up. 

He’s got a cop he needs to talk to. 

————————  
It takes less to convince Wallis to reopen the investigation into Evgeni’s part in Sid’s disappearance than Sid had expected. The FBI has lost interest, so he only has to deal with the Newark police, and they would really like a living person to hang some blame on for the cluster-fuck the media is making the whole thing out to be.

“I just can’t be sure,” Sid says. “I kept falling asleep. Maybe I was falling asleep too much. Maybe he was slipping something into my food, keeping me there without force. I just can’t know. I thought I’d let the professionals do their job and I’ll cooperate in any way I can. Whatever the truth is, that’s the important thing.”

“We’ll do whatever it takes,” Wallis assures him, and Sid ends the call feeling like he’s tried, at least, like he’s done all he can.  
———————

Time passes and Evgeni despairs. He is moved from one vremennyy place to another. Light and dark come in regular rhythms, an endless pattern. Tedious and never-ending. Evgeni has never been outside for so long. All the places are new, and yet he cannot stop himself from touching the walls, fingers and heart searching for the cracks that could lead him home.

Three times, he is taken out of his cell, brought to a small room with a metal table. The man is there, and a different translator. The questions begin again, cycling between calm and cajoling and shouted accusations. 

The fourth time, there is a different man, older, his voice soft and soothing. He says he is a doctor. He asks Evgeni about where he has come from, the things he has seen. About Home and Prosya and his life. He goes away, eventually, and after that Evgeni is left to his cell, for four cycles of light and dark.

He’s led to the inquisition room again, and there is a woman this time, tall and dark-skinned. 

“Crosby says he thinks you kept him against his will,” she says, and the translator repeats so there can be no question.

“Sidney?” Evgeni asks. Sorrow fills his heart. That he did this thing, that he betrayed Sidney by not letting him go when he first asked to.

“He was hurt,” Evgeni protests, “They hurt him out here. He needed to rest. Just a little. I only kept him a little.”

——————

 

The media goes crazy. Sidney Crosby changing his mind, deciding to charge the man he said didn’t kidnap him. 

Sid gets away from it all by calling a real estate agent. 

“I need to buy a building,” he says at their first meeting. “Something historic.”

She blinks at him. “Do you know how many bedrooms you’re looking for? Baths? You might find that older homes are designed to smaller scale amenities than you’re used to…”

“I need a building,” Sid says again. “At least a hundred years old. A house, a store, a factory. It isn’t important. I’ve got a budget of two million. Let me know what’s available.”

Her mouth opens and closes twice, her eyes go so wide Sid can practically see the dollar signs. Sometimes a reputation for a certain level of eccentricity has it’s advantages.

“I. I’ll let you know,” she says.

“As soon as possible, please,” Sid says, and she nods. 

“I’ll send you a list, and we can narrow it down.”

“Perfect. Tomorrow?”

———————

Sid follows the news, clicking through sports gossip and speculation. It’s a big deal in Pittsburgh, his inescapable fame putting what should be a minor footnote onto the front of the sports section of the newspaper. 

It explodes over mainstream media, that Sidney Crosby’s kidnapper stepped foot in Newark’s Veterans’ courthouse, ready to enter a guilty plea, stumbled against a wall and disappeared from sight. It’s the most improbable, unbelievable jail-break in the history of the New Jersey judicial system. 

Sid thinks he’ll feel relieved, but it sits in his chest, that Evgeni is _gone_. He yearns, aching for something he can’t even name. 

He reads all the websites, about the manhunt, the search. The police call him, but he says he hasn’t seen Evgeni, that he’s not afraid. 

He makes his final decision on a building that same week. It’s under his budget, but still more house than he needs, a 1890’s half-timbered Tudor Revival (or so the agent tells him), on it’s own acre of land. It’s…ugly, in Sid’s opinion, the contrast of the timber on stucco too sharp, the rooms tiny and dark and cramped. 

But he can feel, just walking through, the sweet age of it, children born and people dieing between these walls. He can feel the Doors as he trails his fingers along the paneling, there for the opening. Home just on the other side. 

“I’ll take it,” he says. “How soon can I move in?” 

“There’s paperwork,” the agent cautions, “But it shouldn’t take more than ten days.”

That’s too long, everything is taking too long. He’ll be back on the Penguins active roster by then, busy until summer. He needs. He needs to see Evgeni. To touch him, to apologize, to make sure he’s okay.

“Can I rent it?” he asks. “Until the final sale goes through.”

“I’ll inquire,” she says.

“Call them now, please,” Sid says, and he wanders off, learning his new house’s narrow halls and secret closets. 

The sellers are happy to take Sid’s money, and Sid only goes back to the Lemieux’s for long enough to get some things and borrow an air mattress (for appearance’s sake) before he returns, scared and hopeful and ready, finally, to go Home. 

=======

Evgeni pulls on his boots, in the cozy nest of his room. Snugs the laces up, ties a neat bow on each. He steps to the closed door, thinks _outside_ and _Sidney._ Tries to wrap himself in the idea of it, tries to latch onto Sidney’s scent, the sound of his voice, the way he’d said “Oh. I kissed Jack here.” 

Evgeni breathes, and opens the door, and on the other side is hallway, a place he’s seen often, though not always connected to his room. He sighs, and even he isn’t sure if it’s relief or disappointment. 

He thinks, that when he has figured that out, he can start wondering if his inability to open a door to the outside is his own failure of desire, or if Home has forbidden it, has decided that wayward sons must be kept inside for their own good. 

He is no longer Poproshayek. Has not stepped outside since he did so with Sidney. 

Even the thought of the man brings an ache to his chest, a sick twisted confusion. He doesn’t know what went wrong. If Sidney is well, but betrayed him-- or if the men in the jail lied. If Sidney truly feels Evgeni was keeping him away from his people for some nefarious purpose.

He walks the hall, lets his mind clear. Lets Home take him where she will. 

The scent of bread draws him in, and he thinks “Oh. Tsentr.” And now he will work the ovens until he tires. Perhaps the next time he seeks he’ll find the gardens. Maybe he’ll watch the stars with the Astronomi again. See if it makes more sense now that he feels older, wiser. Now that he has seen just how still it is, to be in one place for days and nights all in their order, regimented and inflexible.

He steps into the kitchen, and Mama Ksyusha looks across the room at him, looks at him as if she can see the wound in his young heart and does not know how to stop his bleeding. 

He does not know how to explain, that he would take twice the hurt, if he could exchange some certainty for it. If he could know, one way or another, if he has harmed Sidney, if he’s done wrong to him despite his honest intentions. 

A row of bowls stand the middle of the table, covered in thin cloths, the dough risen and round and tall inside of each one. He starts with the first, spills it out onto flour-coated wood, dusts his hands the same, and begins his work.

===============

The air is cold beyond the Door that Sid opens in his bedroom wall. A faint breeze brushes across his skin as he steps through, the air bitter-scented, metallic. The lighting beyond the threshold is dim, and he sets his jaw. Walks. The floor is stone, the light pale and indirect. He cannot see the ceiling, but there are walls on either side of him.

He turns a corner, and an old door stands before him, paint peeling, dust heavy on the ground. He pushes it open, and there is a long balcony ahead of him, wall to the left, railing to the right, and a stair on the other side leading up.

The floor though, has broken boards, gaps. His phone is by the bedside, because he was so worried about going missing again, about the phone records showing a connection in some distant impossible part of the world. If he falls, if he gets hurt, he won’t be able to call anybody to help him.

“Please,” Sid whispers. Closes the door and reopens it. The scene has not changed. He looks behind him, and his room in the new house is _right there. ___

__“I need to see him. I need to know,” Sid pleads, and takes a step. The floor holds, and he moves towards the wall, remembering the landing at his grandmother’s house, where the boards creaked so much worse in the middle of their span. The wood groans under his feet, but doesn’t break. Holds as he side-steps, quick and light, holding his breath. Please please please, he chants under his breath. Makes it to the other side._ _

__There had been a stair beyond, when he started walking, but sometime when he was looking at his feet it changed, and now there’s a long narrow room, the plywood covering the floor buckled into waves, scattered with broken glass, moss growing between the four-foot by eight-foot sections._ _

__Sid takes a breath. Not sure if he’s being urged to turn back, or if his own doubts about his welcome are coloring his trip._ _

__Think place, he reminds himself. Feel place. He imagines Evgeni, the comfort of Home around him, whether it was the warm kitchen or the cozy little bedroom. He imagines Evgeni’s arms around his shoulders as he looks across to the other door. He takes a step, aiming for the places where regular dips mark the supports below the rotted plywood. Feels the wood sag with his weight, the studs firmer underfoot._ _

__=============_ _

__Kitchen work is steady, predictable. It’s song is a gentle round, voices rising and falling in staggered time as bread is kneaded, put into the oven, taken out again. Sweat trickles along Evgeni’s hairline. Lift. Fold. Push. Flip. He works the dough, crushing the air out of it. His arms burn with the work, his voice sings low into the flow of music through the room._ _

__Then the kitchen falters to silence, voices dropping out one by one as people stop what they’re doing, as people turn to the entryway. Evgeni looks up at Mama Ksyusha. She is staring over his shoulder, and he turns to see what has disrupted the easy rhythm of the breadmaking._ _

__Sidney stands, there in the door. A dozen emotions flicker across his face, hope, fear, joy, worry. Evgeni feels prickles in his nose, like he’s taken a sniff of fresh-crushed mint. His eyes water, and he takes a step forwards._ _

__“Sidney?” he asks, even though it could be no one else._ _

__“Zhenya,” Sidney whispers, Evgeni’s heart-name familiar on his lips, as if it is the name he has begun to speak in his mind. His eyes are bright, shining with unshed tears. Evgeni takes a second step towards him, and then Sidney is rushing forward, arms reaching around, strong and healthy, and Evgeni is so glad to see him well._ _

__They stand there, holding each other tight in the middle of the kitchen, the heat of the ovens at Evgeni’s back. A murmur goes through the bakers, and people return to their tasks._ _

__“Sidney,” Evgeni says, and the rest of their foreign tongue has left him. He pushes back, just enough to see Sidney’s face, to check the bruises are all faded, that he is truly as recovered as he seems._ _

__“I’m sorry,” Sidney says, rushed and afraid, still afraid even with Evgeni’s hands on him. “I couldn’t. Couldn’t think of anything else to get you out of there. To get you someplace with roots. Where you could make a door.”_ _

__“Shh shh, shh,” Evgeni hushes him. Too much, too many words. All his doubts seem as dreams now, making no sense now that he is awake. He presses the side of his mouth to Sidney’s temple, holds him tight again._ _

__A pointed cough sounds from behind him, and Evgeni lifts his head, turns to see Mama Ksyusha there with a basket._ _

__“Take your Sidney elsewhere and let us work.” Her voice is scolding, but her eyes twinkle with mirth, with joy at Evgeni’s reunion._ _

__Evgeni nods, takes the basket with one hand and holds tight to Sidney’s with the other. “Thank you, Mama,” he says, and leads Sidney out of the kitchen. They walk, for a long time. Through sun-dappled breezeways with swaying oak trees outside the windows, down winding stairs and between brightly graffitied walls._ _

__Sidney’s mouth quirks, and his fingers tighten on Evgeni’s._ _

__“I think she was angry. Home. That I took you out and lost you. It was really hard getting to the kitchen. I thought I was gonna fall through the floor or have the ceiling collapse on me half the time.”_ _

__He smiles like it was a joke, but Evgeni nods with appropriate seriousness._ _

__“No, is true. Maybe make hard on purpose. To show you want. Not…a little thing.”_ _

__“No,” Sidney agrees. “I wanted to find you. It wasn’t a little thing at all. It was very important to me.”_ _

__They turn a corner, and Evgeni leads him into the garden, to the upper rim, bright light and the scent of growing things all around them, the tropical sun shining down on them. There are people working, gathering vegetables or pulling weeds from the raised beds. Chickens pecking through the scrap pile, goats browsing through fallow plots. He takes a seat on a low wide wall, makes room beside him for Sidney to join him._ _

__Evgeni opens their basket. The bread inside is still warm, and there is fruit and goat-milk butter, and a jug of spiced cider, wrapped in a towel to keep it from going cold._ _

__They eat, drink, watch a lazy bee sample the sweet drips on the lip of Sidney’s cup._ _

__“I bought a house,” Sidney says at last, like he’d just remembered something important._ _

__“Bought?” Evgeni asks, unfamiliar with the word._ _

__Sidney hmms. “Gave money? So it could be mine.”_ _

__Evgeni isn’t really sure about money, but he thinks it is good Sidney has a place._ _

__“Where, before?” he asks. “Where was you sleep?”_ _

__Sidney ducks his head, like his answer is embarrassing. “I lived with Mario and Nathalie. Ever since I came to Pittsburgh. They’re older. Not as old as my parents, but they took good care of me.”_ _

__Evgeni doesn’t know about that. Sidney didn’t seem very cared-about when they met._ _

__“So why house? Why change?”_ _

__Sidney smiles, wry. “Their place was too new. No roots. I need to be able to come and go, if I’m going to come here.” He hesitates. “If I’m welcome here.”_ _

__Evgeni scoffs. “Most welcome. Any time. Next time, you work. Cannot be new-child all the times.”_ _

__Sidney smiles, glances side-eyed at Evgeni._ _

__“I’m not actually a kid, you know. I’m twenty-one years old.”_ _

__Evgeni scoffs, waves him off. “What is twenty-one? What is years?”_ _

__Sidney gapes and Evgeni bumps his shoulder. They smile and eat, then walk the garden, between the raised beds. Feed their scraps to the animals and admire the broad yellow flowers of the okra plants._ _

__They get to the other side and Sidney sighs. “I gotta head back.”_ _

__Evgeni frowns. “No. No, why going back. Stay.”_ _

__Sidney shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know what time it is. I’ve got appointments. People waiting on me. I’ve been gone too long already.”_ _

__Evgeni’s chest aches. “Sidney,” he says, trying to put how bad it makes him feel, to let him go again._ _

__“I’ll come back,” Sidney promises. “I’ve got a day off in three days. I’ll come then. Spend most of it here.”_ _

__Evgeni will have to go to the Astronomi, to find when three days will be up, to know when to hope for Sidney._ _

__“It is important?” Evgeni asks. “To go?”_ _

__Sidney nods, and Evgeni cannot imagine what it is to care about something on both sides of a door. Except that now, with Sidney, he does too._ _

__He bows his head, and leads Sidney to the wall that surrounds the garden. Sidney reaches out to touch it with his fingertips, but turns to Evgeni at the last moment. Raises up on his toes and darts a kiss out onto the corner of Evgeni’s mouth._ _

__He’s too surprised to react, and Sidney is stepping back, stepping _through_ and gone, back to the outside. _ _

__Evgeni smiles, raises his hand to press the spot where Sidney’s lips had brushed._ _

__Sidney will return. He’s not sure if he should, but he believes._ _


	2. Bits and pieces and how I planned to end this story

Sid presses his fingers to his lips, laughing at himself in the quiet of his dark old house.

 _I kissed Zhenya,_ he thinks, feeling very wild and reckless. He checks the time. Two hours. Two hours until he has to get up and start his day.

Worth it. Worth every bit. He plugs the pump into the air mattress and starts the little motor running. 

Three more days, and then he can go back. He starts to plan, what he can bring for next time. A clock, maybe, so he’ll have a better idea of what time it is. Something for a gift for Mama Ksyusha. What do little old ladies like? Yarn? Perfume? Jewelry? He’s got three days to think on it. 

He turns off the pump when the motor starts to strain. Throws a sheet over the mattress. It’s not terribly cold in here, but cool enough that he puts a blanket on top of the sheet and folds himself into it, so that there’s heavy cloth between him and the air in the mattress as well as the air of the room.

Three days. He needs to start planning.

==========

“Is it okay if I come over for breakfast?” Sid asks on the phone.

Nathalie is honestly more relieved than amused. With all he’s been through, she’d been really worried when he moved out so suddenly. That he would isolate himself, that he would fall into some kind of post-traumatic depression. He hadn’t even invited them to see the new place. She knows she’s not his mother, but she’s the closest thing within a thousand miles. If she’s not going to do it, who is?

He sounds good, though. Tired but happy. Maybe the new surroundings, the new project, are good for him.

“Of course. I’ll make you a plate. Are you on the way?” 

“Just leaving now.” She can hear him shuffling around, getting ready to go out the door. “Hey Nathalie?” he asks, and she makes a questioning sound. “Thanks.”

She isn’t sure what the big deal is, but answers “Anytime,” and means it.

=========

Ebay is an amazing thing, Sid thinks as he clicks ‘add to cart’ on another item. SC Patrick is running up a hell of a tab, but nobody would associate these purchases with Sidney Crosby, even if he used something closer to his real name. A game for Prosya, a marble slab cooking sheet for Mama Ksyusha. 

He bought a scarf, soft cashmere, thick and warm, for Zhenya. It hangs on the foot of Sid’s recently-delivered bed, and he likes the look of it there, like Zhenya will be by any moment to pick it up. Like he’ll come out of the bathroom and loop it around his neck, lean in to kiss Sid good morning on his way out the door. 

The only thing he’s bought and rush-shipped was the EMS quality first-aid pack and a book to go with it. He’s not sure how much good the book will do, but when he gets a minute he’s willing to sit with whoever will care and try to translate it for them. The way his own injuries had been treated had worked, but he imagines something worse, someone needing an actual doctor, and trying to fix a life-threatening wound with garlic and cabbage. Of all the things the people of Home require, this is the one that he’s uniquely able to provide.

=========

“Where do you go?” Evgeni asks. They’re in the workroom, Sid trying not to lose a finger as Evgeni shows him how to plane down gray old wood until the golden heart reappears.

“I play hockey,” Sid answers, looks up to catch Evgeni’s blank look. 

“Um, I skate, and try to get the puck into the net.”

That clearly isn’t any more enlightening. 

“I’ll bring some things to show you next time,” Sid promises.

He stays for 5 hours, according to the watch he remembered to bring this time.

Zhenya protests less when he says he has to go. Sid has a sudden worry, that the kiss was wrong last time, a poorly-thought out decision.

“Podozhdite minutku,” Evgeni says, reaches for his hand as Sid is about to slip through the door he’s made. He leans in, breathes soft against Sid’s mouth.

“Yes?” he asks, and Sid closes the distance, kisses him slow and careful. 

“Yes,” he says as he pulls away. 

Zhenya smiles and lets him go.

==============

==============

Sid spends most of his summer in Home, as Zhenya re-does his rotation through the possible careers. Learns some skills and gains appreciation for the work that goes into making the people run. He learns how to keep the garden roof open, how to work with his hands, things he just never had the time for, growing up.

 

Geno can't leave home, but the others bring interesting trinkets for Sid from their journeys. Sid picks up little gifts for Prosya, and starts to keep an eye out for things that Home might need--he doubles up parts of his grocery order, adds white sugar and baking powder and some little things he notices Mama Ksyusha hoarding like they're precious. Scissors. He notices the gaps in what is available in Home, how there's no doctor, so he buys some books that might help. He starts paying attention to the things he doesn't know how to do, and the people who do. He picks up "Home Electronics for Dummies" because some of the wiring in there is a little scary, bridging dimensional gaps as it does, fiber-wrapped cords from the 1940's mixed with modern wire. 

He and Geno get closer, spend the nights in the same bed (Geno on top of the covers, always clothed). Sid is willing for more, but Geno's hands always stay above the waist, always outside his clothes. Finally Sid has to say something about it, like "Is it a marriage thing? Because we could do that. Not that I'm marrying you to get in your pants, but we could get married AND have sex." But the problem is that Sid is not vzroslyy. Is not recognized as an adult. Nobody can really even tell him what he has to do to become vzroslyy, either. It takes as long as it takes. And Geno is content to wait. 

The season starts again, and Sid does the usual delivery for some of the season ticket holders. There's one, a couple who have held tickets since the franchise started, charming old lesbians and Sid spends way too much time there in their little old cottage. So much that he sends the camera guys and everybody else out for a while as they make tea for him and they talk. One of them was a doctor for ages, worked for Doctors Without Borders for a long time until her heart condition mandated that she be closer to an actual ER at all times and she'd been forced to retire. 

Zhenya still can't travel outside of home (whether it's his latent fear making it hard, or if Home is unhappy that he was kept from her, who knows), but Sid comes home to his old house one night, worn out from a game, and Zhenya is there in his living room lounge chair, Prosya in his arms and they're both burning up with fever. Someone caught measles and brought it home, and nobody there is vaccinated so it's blooming into a epidemic overnight.

Sid can't remember the address for the sweet old ladies, but he remembers how their house felt, the warm welcome of it, and he goes through home and opens a door there (on the outside of their house, because otherwise would be unbearably rude) and rings their door bell. It takes...a lot less convincing than he'd thought it would, but they go with him to help (he talks for like 2 minutes and they figure out he's talking about the people who 'kidnapped' him the previous winter. 

Sid works as hard as he can to help. Bringing people to the makeshift hospital in his house, pushing and begging at doors, promising Home he won't get sick, that he can help, please please until she lets him in to save her children. He learns to change an IV and take temperatures and do all the messy hard work of having 100 people in a private home. He calls in 'tired' to a mandatory practice, and keeps Mario from barging in and discovering everyone.

 

The storm blows over and nobody dies. As small family units are declared well they go back through the farmhouse to home. And when there's no patients left, the doctor and her wife go with them.

 

Sid plays his next game running on fumes, but he makes it. A couple days pass outside. He sees Geno a few times, and it's good again, Prosya coming out to visit Sid in his house instead of him always visiting hers. They're happy.

 

And then one night Geno comes to Sid, smiling and holding a secret tight behind his lips. Draws Sid through a door and down corridors lit with Christmas lights twinkling, to the center of Home, where a party of epic proportions is being thrown to welcome Sid to adulthood. 

 

After, when Geno is half-carrying Sid to his bed, he teases "So we marry now? Or you want in my pants without?"


End file.
